ET Insider – July 31, 2007

Elite Traveler Insider –

July 31, 2007

Elite Traveler Insider

By Douglas D. Gollan, President and Editor-in-Chief, Elite Traveler Magazine  

Welcome to the latest issue of Elite Traveler Insider, the bi-weekly newsletter designed to update our top partners on trends in the private jet lifestyle. This information is provided to offer a better understanding of how to target these globetrotting elite travelers, their impact on your business and other trends that affect you. Remember, private jet travelers are paying up to $10,000 per hour to fly by private jet, so these super rich consumers could be and should be your best customer. We talk about them and how you can get more of them and more from them.

CONTENTS:

1. Apple’s iPhone to Shine with Elite Traveler Content…

2. Elite Traveler featured in The Los Angeles Times…

3. What’s on Tap this Summer? Stars Follow the Stars…

4. In the UK, 1% now control 24% of the wealth…

5. U.S. Wealth Concentration At Its Highest since the 1920s…

6. The Next Generation of Stars likes to Make Money and Spend It…

Does Elite Traveler work? Two readers of Elite Traveler just made real estate purchases with Ginn Sur Mer for over $15 million!

1. Apple’s iPhone to Shine with Elite Traveler Content…

Elite Traveler is one of fewer than 20 magazines that have been chosen as content launch partners for Apple’s new iPhone. With launch sales five times higher than the iPod, iPhone looks like to be another hit for Apple’s dynamic chairman Steve Jobs.

Personally, I am very excited about being part of this test. While other magazines follow a distribution model created over a half century ago (subscriptions and newsstand sales), Elite Traveler understood that this archaic model was not an effective way to reach the Super Rich.

For the uber-wealthy, their private jets set them free, enabling them to globetrot on a few hours notice. Bouncing around the world from a five-star hotel in London to a home in Aspen, a yacht in the Med, then business in China, magazines were missing this lucrative, high-spending and fast moving target.

Elite Traveler has built an incomparable network of over 4,000 distribution points in more than 90 countries to place our magazines onto private jets. With a BPA audited circulation of over 132,000 copies, we assure advertisers that wherever in the world their best customers are, Elite Traveler is with them. We have over 230,000 readers with a Household Income of $1 million + every issue — more than Departures, Town & Country, Robb Report, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal combined!

Apple understood that like magazines, the music industry’s distribution system and platforms were archaic. iPod has revolutionized the way we listen to music.

Providing our content for the iPhone enables our readers to access our content online as they step off their jet, as well as in addition to our beautiful magazine they will find on board. Having Elite Traveler content in the palm of their hand fits nicely into their private jet lifestyle. Obviously, we are excited to be part of this test!

2. Elite Traveler featured in The Los Angeles Times…

Below is an article in The Los Angeles Times on our July/August 101 Best Suites Pure Decadence issue. The reporter definitely understood the private jet lifestyle. It is a fun and entertaining read:

“In Las Vegas & beyond, suite dreams made for the elite” By Jane Engle, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

What does $40,000 buy?

If you’re an average American, it’s nearly your household income for a year. If you’re a well-heeled traveler, it’s one night at the Hugh Hefner Sky Villa, a two-story, 10,000-square-foot hideaway with a $700,000 cantilevered Jacuzzi that juts over the Las Vegas Strip, a rotating bed beneath a mirrored ceiling and around-the-clock butler service.

The Playboy-themed digs, which opened last fall at the Palms Casino Resort is the most expensive of 101 hotel suites featured in a just-released annual survey by Elite Traveler, a 6-year-old magazine distributed aboard private jets and mega-yachts to readers with average household incomes over $5 million.

Priced from $1,500 per night and up, the 101 suites come with various perks, such as a private indoor lap pool, personal chef and use of a six-figure Maserati Quattroporte sedan, said Doug Gollan, editor in chief of the New York-based magazine.

For the supersuites’ guests, of course, price is no object. “An amazingly huge concentration of wealth” is driving demand for everything from fancy rooms to private jets, Gollan said.

Editors tapped 14 well-traveled celebrities, including Wimbledon champion Roger Federer and performers Kim Cattrall, Harry Connick Jr. and Cuba Gooding Jr., to help review the mostly new or renovated suites, which were judged on luxury, location, privacy and one-of-a-kind design.

Most of the U.S. hotels in the July/August Elite Traveler roster are in the West or Hawaii, reflecting the plethora of “great resort areas” there, Gollan said. Southland hotels on the list include the Hotel Bel-Air, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and the Beverly Wilshire, a Four Seasons hotel.

“We have looked at all of them firsthand,” Gollan said of himself and colleagues. “Being poor editors, we can’t afford to stay in them. But many of the celebrities have.”

It’s getting harder to afford these digs if you’re a mere mortal. In last year’s survey, the top-priced rooms cost a mere $25,000 per night. That bought (and still buys) the penthouse at the Setai hotel in Miami, with butler service and a private pool, and the Palms’ Hardwood Suite, outfitted with half a basketball court, locker room and 95-inch-long (NBA-sized) bed.

Over the six years the magazine has searched out luxury suites for its “Pure Decadence” issue, Gollan has seen them get bigger and more expensive, following the mega-mansion trend.

When they travel, the rich “want the comforts of their 30,000-square-foot home in Bel-Air or wherever,” he said.

In fact, many guests who book the 16 Fantasy Suites at the Palms, which include villas, suites and poolside bungalows, are from the Los Angeles area.

“Hollywood executives are especially drawn to those accommodations,” said Palms spokesman Chris Walters, as are movie and TV stars, captains of big business and foreign royalty. Corporations use the suites for events, though most are booked for private stays.

Although Walters declined to name the royalty who have laid their heads on the suites’ beds, he was more willing to dispense pillow talk about celebrities.

The Hardwood Suite, he said, has hosted Dennis Rodman, George Clooney and Lindsay Lohan. And yes, Hugh Hefner has slept in his namesake villa. The aging sultan of swank checked in for the suite’s opening in October. And in March, accompanied by three girlfriends, he came back to celebrate his 81st birthday there, Walters said.

Not quite the Playboy Mansion. But close.

3. What’s on Tap this Summer? Stars Follow the Stars…

Celebrities are just one segment of Elite Traveler’s readership (we can take credit for Bruce Willis’ next co-star – check out the cover girl on the September/October 2006 issue of Elite Traveler where Mr. Willis discovered the lovely Louise).

Of course Elite Traveler and celebrities have two important things in common: we both travel frequently and can be found aboard private jets.

So from USA Today, while the Mass Affluent worry about their increased mortgage payments and higher energy costs, here is a quick rundown of where some elite travelers visited this past month:

• Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carey vacationed on Hawaii’s Big Island
• Ben Affleck and wife Jennifer Garner enjoyed a family vacation with Matt Damon and his wife Luciana and their children. With no need to worry about vacation days, the couples reportedly spent three weeks
• Pop singer Nick Lachey and girlfriend Vanessa Minnillo rented a private villa near Puerto Vallarta
• Britney Spears, who is reportedly living temporarily at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles, jetted to the Four Seasons Punta Mita for a luxury vacation away from her luxury hotel home.
• Beyonce and Jay-Z were sighted with shopping bags in tow as they shuttled from their yacht to Portofino and Saint Tropez. The pair interrupted their vacation to jet back stateside for an event and within 24 hours were back on their yacht.
• Eva Mendes combined Valentino’s party to celebrate his 45 years in Fashion in Rome with a trip to Capri while a myriad of stars from Uma Thurman to Katie Holmes jetted in for the event.
• Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones have been photographed on a yacht in both Menorca and Valencia, perhaps doing some America’s Cup watching.
• Tom Cruise and Katie made a stop in Saint Jean Cap Ferrat for a friend’s wedding and a beach vacation. Did they come and leave together? We don’t know – they both have their own private jets!
• Jack Nicholson spent his 4th of July week partying in the South of France while Tony Parker and Eva Longoria combined a pre-wedding yacht vacation with a wedding in Paris.

According to the National Business Aviation Association, this is just normal travel for the private jet crowd. The average private jet flyer takes 41 trips per year; research by Prince & Associates shows they take 11 intercontinental trips per year. It’s why Elite Traveler’s BPA audited distribution aboard private jets in over 90 countries around the world ensures our advertisers that their message is reaching the target wherever their elite travels happen to take them!

A very nice woman I know from several encounters at various trade shows made the comment to me about a month ago, “until I started flying privately I had never heard of your magazine.” She added, “I like that Elite Traveler is truly exclusive and the format is so beautiful.”

Naturally, I was pleased and appreciative of her comments. One reason we call ourselves The Private Jet Lifestyle Magazine is because we are written and designed for people who have arrived (on their private jets of course!).

With the continued boom in private jet travel, each issue of Elite Traveler is read by over 425,000 wealthy individuals. The average Household Income of our reader is $5.3 million, some 25 times higher than Departures or Robb Report and some 40 times higher than Town & Country. We have more readers with a $1 million Household Income than all three of those publications – combined!

4. In the UK, 1% now control 24% of the wealth…

The chasm between rich and poor in London today hasn’t been this large since Victorian times, according to The Guardian. Today’s super-rich are endowing a new generation of cities globally. In New York, Shanghai and London, the cosmopolitan plutocracy outdo each other in displays of hard-to-believe spending from the car showroom, to the jewelry store to the restaurant table, according to the British paper.

A Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on social segregation in Britain has highlighted the split in society. With the personal wealth of the richest 1% now controlling 24% of the national share, it says the UK is headed towards Victorian levels of inequality.

5. U.S. Wealth Concentration At Its Highest since the 1920s…

According to a recent Front Page article in The New York Times, only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth (1/100th) of a percent of the income distribution.

Currently, 5 percent of the national income is divided by just 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.

This market, the piece notes, is the core customer for luxury goods and services, spending a couple thousand dollars at the drop of the hat and often splurging on six- and seven-digit purchases.

Elite Traveler continues to be the most targeted and cost-effective vehicle to reach the Super Rich. According to research from MMR and Prince, Elite Traveler delivers more readers with a Household Income of 1 million+ (231,000) than The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Departures, Town & Country and Robb Report combined (225,000)! More importantly, with BPA audited distribution in over 90 countries worldwide we provide advertisers with something no other publication can – readership wherever in the world our Super Rich readers happen to be jetting or yachting!

6. The Next Generation of Stars likes to Make Money and Spend It…

For luxury marketers, rule #1 is: A customer has to have money to be a customer. With that in mind, here are some young top earners who figure to be spending money for a long time to come:

• Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe, 17, worth $50 million. He recently spent $17,000 on a Savoir mattress. Of course, co-stars Emma Watson, 17, and Rupert Grin, 18, aren’t doing badly. They made $5 million for each of the last two Harry Potter movies.
• Nike, Sony and Omega sponsorships give 17-year old golfer Michelle Wie over $10 million in annual income. She recently said she likes to shop in her home town of Honolulu where there is no shortage of luxury boutiques.
• Hilary Duff at 19 gets $2 million a movie, but with her records and other businesses, Forbes estimates she earns over $12 million per year. For fun she likes to splurge on handbags and watches. She also treated big sister Haylie to a St. Bart’s vacation.
• Disney Channel star Vanessa Hudgens, 18, made $2 million last year, enough to feel comfortable for a 10-day stay at a $3,100 a night suite in Maui.
• Barbados born singer Rihanna, 19, who reportedly makes multiple millions per year, says she doesn’t like to go overboard with spending. However, she has trouble saying no to shoes — Louboutins in particular — and can’t say no when she is in Fendi — her mom is a fan.