The world is fascinated by how the ultrarich live and work. By arranging their travel, a 25-year-old Canadian who grew up in a log cabin gained a few insights, and one thing she learned is that the wealthiest customers aren’t the hardest ones to serve.
Olivia Ferney, a luxury travel specialist who was named as one of TIME’s top digital influencers of the year, pulls off the vacation wishes of millionaires and billionaires for a living, reenacting some of those interactions for more than 2 million followers on TikTok and Instagram combined.
Ferney found millionaires are harder to serve because while they wanted to spend like billionaires on travel, they just didn’t have the same financial cushion. This could mean splurging on a $300,000 to $400,000 yacht, regretting it, and then asking for a refund.
“They’ll make up ‘issues’ with the trip to try and get cash back every time,” she told The Independent.
She told Fortune Daily’s Ellie Austin her clients’ attitudes fell on a wealth bell curve, with the bottom 30% to 40% being “really, really difficult,” the middle “a little bit easier,” and then “the top was just completely amazing to work with” because there wasn’t that friction of buyer’s remorse.
That experience of billionaires being easier to work with helped shape how her company, Top Tier Travel, chooses clients. The business once operated like a conventional travel agency, earning 8% to 12% on trips, Ferney said. But as her social videos drew the attention of wealthier customers, including billionaires who directly messaged her, the company decided to focus more narrowly with a “payment gate” rather than trying to serve everyone. Top Tier’s clients now fork over a $100,000 annual fee and have to spend at least $1 million on travel per year.
Even within that subgroup, Ferney said clients spend differently. Some come from seven generations of wealth and take the same two family trips every year. Others work in crypto and call her when the market is doing well asking for a trip to Ibiza where they can blow “a couple million dollars really quickly.”
“I don’t think any two of them have taken the same trip at any point in time,” Ferney said.
Growing through the children of the rich
The ultrawealthy are known to be private, but Ferney’s social media posts recreating client interactions helped catapult Top Tier into high-net-worth circles through their heirs.
She said it’s often the children of those families who “love to spend money” that find her content online and then ask for things that have scarcity value.
“A lot of times, I’ll get texts about finding unique items that they can’t necessarily even purchase direct from Hermès anymore, or they want the bag that Cardi B got from Chanel that no one can get their hands on, or the world’s biggest croissant from Paris,” Ferney said.
She also said wealthy families might find her content relatable. For example, she put out an Instagram post reenacting how she called to tell a CEO his son lost $900,000 gambling on the World Cup.
“These people feel like they’re being heard because they’ve dealt with similar issues, and not everybody understands how to solve those problems, and we’re showing that we can,” Ferney said.
She said working with younger clients now could give Top Tier an edge down the road as baby boomers prepare to hand off $124 trillion in the Great Wealth Transfer because “it’s going to take a long time” for her luxury travel industry peers to understand young elites’ purchasing behavior.
“We’re going to be ahead of the game because we’re working with a lot of these kids already,” she said.