If money was no object, how would you travel?

Would you go first class everywhere, holiday for weeks at a time, take your family and friends, explore exotic places at the world’s end, and check into only the most luxurious hotels in every destination?

It’s nice to fantasise sometimes, but for a small portion of the world’s travellers, booking top suites in palace hotels, bedroom compartments on planes and $40,000 expedition cruises doesn’t break a sweat. And for a fraction of these people, private jets, chartered yachts and buyouts of 30-room Venetian villas are as commonplace as road trips for the rest of us.

According to Tina Edmundson, president, luxury, at Marriott International, there are two types of affluent travellers, the aspiring ones and the truly affluent. I think there are also the sporadically affluent – those who like the finer things of life but need to save up for them and splurge only every other trip or so. After the pandemic, more Australians joined this select set, having stacked away a considerable cache of savings and earmarked it for the travel they missed so badly.

Tina Edmundson says that post pandemic, the luxury brands have recovered fastest. It makes sense that the affluent are less troubled by the inflationary prices currently being charged by airlines and hotels.

“The pandemic has made people feel that the time is now,” Edmundson says. “The Bucket Lists have become To Do lists. Travel has gone from being nice to have, to need to have. It’s become a primal need.”

Marriott has eight diverse brands, across 495 hotels, many such as Ritz-Carlton, and JW Marriott, firmly in the luxury category. Travel for the affluent is “now more about developing closer bonds with people you care about, your friends and your family. It’s not just about making money, it’s how you spend your time,” Edmundson says. “People are valuing luxury travel quite differently now. Time is precious. They want to really make the most of it.”

“A holiday is more than ‘just a holiday’ for modern luxury consumers, especially post-pandemic,” says Toni Ambler, managing director of Luxury Gold, which specialises in small group journeys.