ET Insider – May 1, 2012

Elite Traveler Insider –

May 1, 2012

Elite Traveler Insider

============================================================ More than ever private jet travelers, or elite travelers as we like to call them, are the most lucrative market for luxury brands and service providers.  With readers spending $10,000 per hour to fly privately, the over 600,000 readers Elite Traveler reaches each issue provide you a great way to make sure your message is in front of consumers who have the money to be good customers.  With our Asia Edition, Elite Traveler Superyachts, our over 60 Elite Traveler Destination Guides at Elitetraveler.com, our global database of private jet owners and our award-winning custom marketing team, we would welcome the opportunity to be of help to you in making sure you get a bigger share of our reader spending.

With a Net Worth of more than $25 trillion, I hope you will agree elite travelers should be a key target for your marketing! =============================================================

In this issue:

1. Homeless with 20 Homes… Where Do They Live? 2. Lagerfeld to Design Helicopters 3. Advertising to the Super Rich – Does It Work? 4. You Have 8 Million Hours a Year to Sell More to the Super Rich

============================================================ 1. Homeless With 20 Homes… Where do they live?

TLC is shorthand for “traveling luxury consumers”, a segment of wealthy private jet setters Burberry executives cited as a core luxury customer who can be counted on despite economic anxiety.  “Global Nomads” was a phrase coined early century to identify what former Wall Street Journal Wealth Reporter Frank Rich calls Upper Richistan, a global nation of Ultra High Net Worth families that have more in common with each other than their ‘home’ country.

Recently when I was in Paris meeting top executives at luxury conglomerate Richemont (owner of 14 luxury houses including Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Dunhill, Vacheron Constantin, IWC, and Roger Dubuis), I was given a new one, that has quickly become my favorite:  “Homeless with 20 Homes.”

Of course, it is always interesting to see the lists of where UHNWs want to live or where billionaires call home.

According to the 2012 Citi Private Bank Knight Frank Wealth Report, the places where UHNWs are most likely to be found on the ground are London, New York, Hong Kong, Paris, Singapore and Miami, followed by Geneva, Shanghai, Beijing, and finally Berlin. With UHNWs stretching their wings and bases more and more, other top stops for business, pleasure, and often a bit of both include Washington DC, Chicago, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Ankara, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janiero, Brasilia, Brussels, Cairo, Beirut, Vienna and Nairobi.

U.K.-based wealth researcher Wealth Insight recently listed the top cities for billionaires to call home: 1.      New York 2.      Moscow 3.      London 4.      Hong Kong 5.      Mumbai 6.      Istanbul 7.      San Francisco 8.      Shanghai 9.      Paris 10.    Beijing 11.    Chicago 12.    Shenzhen 13.    Los Angeles 14.    Houston 15.    Dallas – Fort Worth 16.    Tokyo 17.    Guangzhou 18.    Dubai 19.    Singapore 20.    Jeddah 21.    Sao Paulo 22.    Taipei 23.    Amsterdam 24.    Riyadh 25.    Hangzhou

Now you may ask what else all these cities have in common beside Billionaires and UHNWs?

Happily, I can report if you are an advertiser with Elite Traveler, the UHNW private jet setters receive copies of Elite Traveler in all of the above, courtesy of our position as the only private jet focused magazine with BPA audited circulation on a global basis.

Your top customers are global.  Your advertising should be, too!

============================================================ ONLY ELITE TRAVELER – Elite Traveler is the ONLY global publication targeting and reaching private jet travelers to have its circulation successfully audited.  View our BPA statement here. ============================================================ 2. Lagerfeld to Design Helicopters… Uber designer Karl Lagerfeld is the latest luxury royalty to take his designs to the sky. AgustaWestland has tapped Lagerfeld to design VIP helicopters, both the interiors and exteriors. The Anglo-Italian company, controlled by Italy’s Finmeccanica, is to initially focus on its AW139 twin-turbine helicopter, though the partnership may be extended to other commercial models. AgustaWestland said Lagerfeld’s “creativity and sophisticated style” would allow it to “introduce a new, limited edition, customized solution” for its growing customer base.

Italian designers Donatella Versace and Stefano Ricci have both in the past offered their designs for private jets while jewelry creator Roberto Coin has helped clients design their mega-yachts. ============================================================ ONLY ELITE TRAVELER – Elite Traveler is the ONLY publication in the world delivering 400,000+ readers with a Household Income of $1 million + ============================================================

3.  Advertising to the Super Rich – Does It Work?

Insider is currently working hard on a white paper about the size and opportunity of the global Ultra High Net Worth community.  How many families are there?  Wealth-X records 185,000 families with a Net Worth of $30 million + and Citi Private Knight Frank estimates their Net Worth at $39.9 Trillion.  How much do they currently spend on luxury products and services?  We estimate around $300 billion per year based on what we have seen so far.  How much more can they spend?  We’re not done but we think it could easily be over $2 Trillion per year.

In other words, luxury brands could sell 600 percent more watches, jewelry, cars, hotel suites, villas, suits, briefcases, handbags – you get my point – to these folks.  Ron Kurtz, founder of The American Affluence Research Center, summed it up for me, saying, “the UHNW market could be spending much more on luxury products if properly motivated/educated.”

So the question comes up, does advertising work against UHNWs?  Below is an excerpt from our upcoming white paper:

Many luxury brands wrongly believe that they are already preferred by UHNW consumers and don’t have to advertise to them.

To that point, one leading luxury hotel group recently found that over 80 percent of customers responding to an offer via a partnership with a leading private jet share and card company were new to the hotel group.

The experience clearly demonstrated the untapped potential of focusing, like Willie Sutton, on venues where there is money.

At the same time, bigger companies tend to focus their print advertising on large circulation titles where as much as 98 percent of readers are the squeezed Mass Affluent segment which is more worried about paying rent than buying a new watch. This is despite the fact that there is compelling evidence that print advertising directed to a financially qualified audience can yield big results.

Proving the point, despite the frenzied rush to all things digital, Elite Traveler is showing that glossy lifestyle magazines can still move high-end product. The magazine is the only global title directed to private jet passengers as an in-flight magazine that has been successfully audited.

Established in 2001, its descriptor is “The Private Jet Lifestyle Magazine” and it touts readers who have an average household income of over $5 million.

In a letter to the magazine, Myriam Gumuchian Schreiber, the owner of New York-based jewelry designer Gumuchian, wrote, “As you know we placed our first ad with Elite Traveler in your November/ December 2011 issue. So far we have sold two $80,000 necklaces right from our (advertising) page.”

Another letter from Sean Emmerton, the reservations manager at Los Cabos luxury villa resort Villas del Mar noted, “Our marketing partnership with Elite Traveler continued to provide tangible results we can track again this year; Elite Traveler continues to be our #1 source for reservations generating close to $1 million in bookings.” Emmerton says guests who booked villa rentals through the magazine have accounted for over $25 million in real estate sales, showing that the deep pockets of these guests go beyond the $5,000 per night cost of renting a villa.

Underscoring the global nature of these travelers, Tony Potter, CEO & managing director of CHI Hotels wrote to the publisher, “Recently we had an American customer who walked in (to the Corinthia Hotel London) with a copy of Elite Traveler and booked two suites that had been directly featured in the magazine. The value of the booking was in the region of $200,000.”

Sonny Sethi, the New York-based CEO of Tara Pearls shared the tale of a Forbes -list billionaire who called up directly from his plane. “The Golden South Sea advertisement looked amazing and we received over $100,000 in sales. The timing of the sale in 2009 was at the height of the financial crisis meltdown.

A necklace from Los Angeles-based jewelry designer Christian Tse caught the attention of an Academy award-winning actor who was reading Elite Traveler on his private jet. Victoria Tse wrote to Elite Traveler, “I must admit I was impressed not only that we moved a $23,000 piece directly from your magazine but the high-profile nature of the purchaser. You have a beautiful magazine and obviously it is reaching the right audience.”

Meanwhile, Roland Iten, a maker of ultra-luxe mechanical belt buckles, told a story of how a magazine in the hands of the right readers who have financial resources to buy can provide a big sale. “Recently, a client contacted us after reading about Roland Iten in Elite Traveler, and after an enjoyable and intimate gathering at our showroom in Switzerland, he purchased seven of our mechanical belt buckles (three in solid gold for himself and one each in steel/ gold for his four sons) resulting in a sale valued at approximately $150,000. The company then advertised in an annual Watch Guide Elite Traveler produces, and Carol Galiano, the business development director, touted a $35,000 sale on the Roland Iten Facebook page: “If you are an independent brand like ours, then you can appreciate that your advertising spend has to yield impact. To this end, hats off to Elite Traveler. It’s not the first time Elite rang bells for us!”

Former Ritz-Carlton Tokyo general manager, and now the CEO of a Hong Kong -based group that owns multiple hotels, Ricco M. de Blank, sent an email to the magazine when he was based in Japan, “I just want to tell you we have in-house the family of the president of one of the African countries and they booked our suites at RACK rates for three days after reading about our hotel in Elite Traveler en route to Japan.” De Blank later said the total spending during the stay was close to $500,000.

In another instance, the director of marketing of Mandarin Oriental, Washington D.C. wrote to Elite Traveler, “I thought you would like to know that right after the story appeared, the wife of a leading chief executive called based on your article and booked the (Mandarin Suite) for two nights for a total of $12,000.”

The Ranch at Rock Creek credited Elite Traveler with two bookings from one reader. The first when the reader and his girlfriend had their pilot change course and go to the Montana luxury Western ranch. After a stay of several nights and spending several thousand dollars, the gentleman booked the entire ranch for a family reunion spending over $100,000. A representative of the property noted the power of Elite Traveler to bring a high-profile reader, in this case the CEO of a Fortune 100 company, based on reading about the resort in the magazine. It was a particularly impressive demonstration of the power Elite Traveler has with its readers as The Ranch at Rock Creek is an independent property with no brand affiliation as an endorsement.

============================================================ ONLY ELITE TRAVELER – Elite Traveler (audited by BPA Worldwide) is the only audited publication delivered to global locations for private jet travelers.  ============================================================ 4.  You Have 8 Million Hours A Year To Sell More To The Super Rich…

As important from a marketer’s standpoint, private jets provide a captive audience of these highly affluent consumers. An estimated 7.9 million hours were flown by private jets during 2011 in the U.S. alone, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. This equates to the time it would take to make 778 round trips by spacecraft to Mars, watch an episode of Friends 16 million times, or run 1,777,777 marathons at an average time of 4:32. There is a lot of marketing opportunity time for companies that would like to sell their products and services to private jet travelers.  And Elite Traveler brings you along for the ride.  Of course, the U.S. is only one of over 100 countries where you get exposure, meaning your ad in Elite Traveler reaches a global audience who shops globally and can ring your cash register. ============================================================ ONLY ELITE TRAVELER – Elite Traveler is the ONLY publication that delivers UHNW consumers on private jets from more than 100 countries with a single ad. ============================================================

All the best,

Douglas D. Gollan Group President and Editor-in-Chief