The Evolution of Travel
Jeff Potter, CEO of Exclusive Resorts, debuts the latest concept in luxury vacationing on a ten-day cruising odyssey through the Galápagos Islands
All but 3 percent of the Galápagos is protected, keeping coastlines like this one pristine.
Jeff Potter and his son, Colby, aboard the Islander.
Pwwwwsh! I look left, right, down. The Galápagos may be famous for the tameness of its wildlife, but not everything is benign. The sharks that patrol these waters are occasionally aggressive, and even the sea lions have been known to take nips out of tourists. A few yards away, I spot a streak of bubbles that reaches down from the surface about 20 feet. It seems to have appeared out of nowhere. The minnows grow frantic, the mass of their bodies quivering as if electrified.
Pwwwwsh! I lift my head above water and catch sight of a missile-shaped bird, wings tucked, arrowing into the sea. The bird knifes through the school of fish below, trailing a wake of bubbles, then somersaults and paddles upward. It’s a blue-footed booby, one of the islands’ many exotic species.
Pwwwwsh! One after another, the birds come. Pwwwwsh! A whole flock circles and plunges, raining into the sea. Pwwwwsh! Pwwwwsh! For the fish, it must feel like London during a buzz-bomb raid. For me, it’s a front-row view of one of the most frenzied links in the food chain. And just another day in the Galápagos with Exclusive Resorts.
ACCESS
> American Airlines (aa.com) flies direct from Miami to Quito, Ecuador. Most U.S.–to–Ecuador flights arrive in the evening, so plan to stay the night.
> Swissôtel Quito is a 275-room modern luxury hotel with six restaurants an...
Founded in 2002, the company began as a small destination club whose 20 members owned four properties in Colorado, Hawaii, New York, and Mexico. Then, in 2003, former AOL honcho Steve Case acquired a majority stake and poured in a share of his $850 million personal fortune. In a stroke, the company became the largest player in the burgeoning high-end destination-club business. Today the company offers access to 350 properties in 11 countries. Its holdings are valued at more than $1 billion.
For the club’s 3,000-plus members, who have an average net worth of over $5 million, the appeal isn’t finding a cost-effective way to travel. Rather, membership allows participants to jet off to a new destination assured that they will enjoy top-notch accommodations. In the Galápagos, for instance, each dive ends with a staff member plucking swimmers out of the water, handing out fresh towels, and whisking the group by Zodiac to a small luxury expedition ship, where attendants in crisp white uniforms stand ready to fulfill every need. Dinner service is on white linen, and a masseuse and private doctor are constantly at the ready. For guests cruising like this through these islands, life becomes a piquant blend of nature’s rawest struggle and mankind’s most elevated luxuriance.
Marine iguanas
Potter knows whereof he speaks. “Through my aviation career, I took a week off a total of six times,” he says. This current trip, a ten-day cruise, will be the longest he’s taken in his life. He’s traveling with his 23-year-old son, Colby, a newly minted college graduate. The excursion is to be their first ever alone, as father and son.
Of course, Potter isn’t just vacationing. He’s a CEO on a ship filled with his best clients. He’s working, too.
LIKE HAWAII, THE GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS churned up from the sea as a result of volcanic activity in the Pacific within the last few million years. Unlike Hawaii, these islands happen to lie in the midst of the cold, rich Humboldt Current, a deep-ocean upwelling along South America’s western coast. Frigid waters mean plentiful food for the sea-dwelling iguanas, sea lions, fur seals, and all manner of seabirds, but they yield scant rainstorms to water the land. As a result, the islands are arid and remained unsettled until modern times. The few creatures that could survive here had the place to themselves.
This, famously, is the land whose marvels of natural history inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, a mechanism that explained the origin of life on earth without invoking a divine creator. Arguably, the principle transformed the Western way of thinking more than any other single theory. I’ve visited other eco hot spots before: Madagascar, Greenland, the Great Barrier Reef. But to my mind, the Galápagos stand apart as a perfect storm of ecological wonder, a place where stunning physical beauty, unspoiled wildlife, unique natural history, and important human history happened to collide.
En route to the islands, on an AeroGal jet flight from Ecuador, I’m glued to the window. After an hour in the air, below a cap of cumulus clouds, the first island slides into view, a low, brownish oval studded with volcanic cinder cones. We descend to the island of Baltra and land on a lonely airstrip with a shed for an arrivals terminal. There’s no sign of human habitation. A bus takes us to a small dock, where a trio of slumbering sea lions occupies the benches in the waiting area, snoring and occasionally twitching to shoo away a fly. The pecking order is clear: We bipeds are just going to have to stand.
Captain Pablo Garces
My fellow passengers are all Exclusive Resorts members or their guests, but none has been on a trip quite like this. Normally, Exclusive Resorts members are entitled to a certain number of days’ lodging at luxury properties or residences in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe—a three-bedroom flat, say, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or a stone cottage on the grounds of an English castle.
Our trip, however, is a new type of Exclusive Resorts program, called Once in a Lifetime. The concept, launched last year, is aimed at allowing members to use their allotment of days in a greater variety of ways. The first itinerary was a tour of Bhutan, with private drivers and lodging at Aman Resorts’ Amankora; soon after, a Kenyan safari in the shadow of Kilimanjaro was added, and a biking trip through the Loire Valley. So far, the company has developed a roster of 15 guided experiences, involving travel to 25 countries.
Here in the Galápagos, Exclusive Resorts neither owns the ship (it’s operated by National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions) nor employs the naturalists who will be our guides. The company, essentially, is vouching for the quality of these vendors—no small matter for a clientele loath to trust a week of their lives to an outfit that might prove second-rate. “Yeah, you can go to the Galápagos without Exclusive Resorts,” says Potter, “but a number of our members have told us that they wouldn’t have felt like going without us.”
Our first afternoon, we gather in the lounge in the back of the ship for a cocktail. My fellow passengers are an elite group among sophisticated connoisseurs of travel. One member is a retired pro football player; another is a Montana cattle-ranch owner. One is a partner at Goldman Sachs; another is the CEO of a Chicago investment firm. Many are almost absurdly well traveled; two of the couples say they’ve taken more than 30 trips with Exclusive Resorts in the last four years. Yet as a group, they are laid-back, unpretentious.
A two-master rocks gently in the waters of the Galápagos
Truth be told, Potter doesn’t completely identify with this crowd. Though his ascent to CEO-hood has made him at least as successful as most of our shipmates, his own background is unabashedly middle-class. The son of an Air Force officer, he was born at a U.S. base in France and spent his childhood years in the peripatetic fashion of military brats everywhere. In 1980, after his junior year of college, he took a job cleaning aircraft for an airline subcontractor for $7 an hour—and he never looked back.
Over the course of a stunning career in aviation, he soared through the ranks, landing in 1995 as vice president of marketing at Frontier, one of the nation’s most admired small airlines. Only after he started there did he realize that the company was in bad financial shape. But thanks in part to Potter’s apt management and perseverance, Frontier not only survived, it thrived. By last year, the airline was beyond profitable, having grown to a fleet of 62 aircraft serving nearly 70 destinations and generating $1.5 billion in revenue.
Around that time, a headhunter approached Potter about taking over the top spot at Exclusive Resorts. Though he wasn’t looking for a change, the airline exec opted for the new opportunity. The switch handed him both advantages and challenges. Exclusive Resorts serves just under 3,500 members, a fraction of Frontier’s customer base. That allows the company to lavish attention on each client. “We have a 95 percent approval rating,” Potter says. “Once someone joins, they don’t leave.” But Exclusive Resorts doesn’t have the name recognition of Frontier. “The company is still widely misunderstood—or not understood at all,” he says. “In the luxury-travel sector, less than 10 percent of the market is aware of us. So my primary focus is to get the word out and let people know, quite frankly, what they’re missing.”
An endemic Nazca booby
From the top of the hill, we are rewarded with spectacular views over the ocean and across a channel to a neighboring island that was largely buried under a lava flow within the last few hundred years. To the west, a dark volcanic pinnacle rises dramatically above a white-sand beach that’s fringed with lush green vegetation.
We return to the ship for breakfast, then come ashore once more, on the beach we spotted from above. Everyone dons snorkel, mask, and fins and hits the water. As I’m maneuvering around a jumble of boulders, I suddenly come face to face with a marine iguana. It’s swimming right toward me, undulating its tail like a mini alligator, and though it’s only about a foot and a half long, I instinctively recoil: It seems like just the sort of thing that might try to rip your face off for the hell of it. I hold my breath and remain very still as it swims within a foot of my mask, then bobs its head under the water and descends to the seafloor, where it gnaws on a knob of coral.
Farther on, I spot a group of members treading water a few yards from a rock. I paddle over to join them and, raising my head out of the water, see that they’ve congregated around a small flock of penguins standing on the lip of an outcropping. The penguins shift their weight from foot to foot, seemingly as confused by us as we are that they should be here on the equator instead of in Antarctica. Then one plops into the water and swims away through the tangle of legs, flapping its wings in underwater flight.
That night, I dine with Doug DeVries, a medical-equipment inventor from Washington State. I mention that I recently borrowed a small plane and used it to fly myself around California. “Oh, that sounds like fun,” he says, as if congratulating a small child for tying his shoes. Turns out DeVries’s hobby is buying and restoring antique planes and then flying them on traverses of places like Australia and Canada. For the rest of the meal, he regales me with the logistical details for his upcoming 10,000-mile seaplane jaunt in the Arctic.
The Islander crosses the equator
At another table, Potter and his son are discussing a beautiful little surf break they spied earlier. A cluster of sea lions was frolicking in the whitewater, launching themselves into the curling waves from underneath and surfing them from the inside. “It would have been the perfect surf break,” Colby says. “We lived near Huntington Beach for a while, and I picked it up a little bit.”
Potter listens quietly to his son. The exec is a big man, six foot two and corn-fed, but the extra heft suits him. His buzz-cut hair and wire-rimmed glasses give him an avuncular air. Colby, too, has a teddy-bearishness to him. The two men share a quiet geniality, and between them one senses that thing that fathers and sons so often have: a laconic familiarity that comes from spending years in one another’s company without ever having a truly revealing conversation.
ACCESS
> American Airlines (aa.com) flies direct from Miami to Quito, Ecuador. Most U.S.–to–Ecuador flights arrive in the evening, so plan to stay the night.
> Swissôtel Quito is a 275-room modern luxury hotel with six restaurants an...
AS OUR VOYAGE CONTINUES AROUND the archipelago, every day brings a new marvel of natural history. Trekking over a scorched plain of black lava, its jagged fragments of crust as fragile as dinner plates, we come upon an oasis of marsh grass surrounding a green lake where pink flamingos stand as motionless as lawn ornaments. Hiking to the highlands of Santa Cruz, we search through a meadow of tall elephant grass for wild giant tortoises, who lumber along like ambulatory boulders. One night, we lean over the railing and watch reef sharks and sea lions lazily circle one another, waiting for flying fish to come into view; when they do, the sea lions chase them down in a flurry of whitewater, leaving the sharks to chomp on the leftovers.
As time goes by, the group seems less like independent travelers and more like a long-established club. The kids form into bands and disappear together; parents swap phone numbers and e-mail addresses and start talking about the next trips they’ll take. I find myself wondering if Exclusive Resorts could transform into a whole other kind of travel company, something more like a migratory country club.
The last excursion of the trip takes us ashore on Española, in the far southeastern corner of the Galápagos. We navigate around a scattering of dozing sea lions and make our way to the edge of a tall cliff, where albatross ride currents of air above a maelstrom of crashing waves that sends plumes of spray a hundred feet high. Along the way, we pass a sandy nesting area where female iguanas butt heads and hiss as they battle for prime egg-laying spots.
At last we turn back toward the ship, threading our way down a winding trail through a boulder-strewn thicket. Bringing up the rear, I notice a patch of color by the edge of a bush. It’s a lone female iguana, perched by the opening to her nesting burrow. As I crouch, it seems to regard me, inscrutably, motionless. Its ribs show through its scaly flanks. Here is natural selection in action. If another female comes along to contend for this spot, this iguana may use up its last reserves of energy and be too weak to return to the sea. I push myself up and leave the creature to continue her struggle.
Hurrying down the trail, I catch up with my shipmates as they reach our landing spot, on the beach. The low-angling sun is turning everything to reddish gold. Already, the Zodiacs are on their way, kicking up rooster tails as they speed to meet us. Soon, we will be at sea. Tomorrow, once again, we will wake up somewhere else.
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