The ULTRAS 2017: Behind the scenes at the Ultratravel luxury travel awards
The readers of Ultratravel,The Telegraph’s luxury travel magazine, are invited to reveal their favourite hotels, airlines, destinations and more each year. Last night, the results for The ULTRAS 2017 awards were finally revealed at a reception and ceremony at London’s Savoy hotel.
As ever, the event was attended by senior members of the luxury travel industry all keen to know if they were among those commended by our well-travelled voters - these are some of the most prestigious and well-regarded awards in the industry. Accompanying them were personalities including television/radio presenter Vernon Kay, Irish singer Ronan Keating and his wife Storm, former English rugby player Mike Tindall and special guest Sarah, the Duchess of York, accompanied by her daughters Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie.
Representing her charity Children in Crisis, the Duchess of York spoke about the organisation’s efforts to provide impoverished and dispossessed children with access to education. Ultratravel and Telegraph readers will have the opportunity to support the charity’s work soon: the influential and generous within the room were implored by Sarah Ferguson to donate travel experiences. Their generous offers will be publicised in a forthcoming issue of Ultratravel, and readers will have the opportunity to bid for their favourite holidays.
The primary focus of the evening was, however, the awards themselves. The best hotel in Europe, according to readers, is The Ritz in London; likewise, those planning a trip to the Americas should find their needs handsomely met at the Four Seasons New York; the best hotel in Australasia was named as the recently remodelled Mandarin Oriental Bangkok. Voted as best hotel in the Middle East, and the world, was Dubai’s Burj Al Arab.
Further accolades commended those excelling in aviation, with Emirates named best airline, Changi the world’s best airport, and Qatar Airways, for its newly unveiled QSuite, commended for introducing the airline innovation of the year. You can see a full list of The ULTRAS 2017 awards and runners-up here.
As ever, the awards were preceded by the Ultratravel Forum, which saw industry stalwarts deliberate over issues affecting the luxury travel industry. TrendWatching forecaster David Mattin spoke about the trends that will revolutionise and disrupt our travel experiences in the years to come, and spoke notably about how the data mined by hotels and tour operators can allow for highly personalised - and potentially unsettlingly intimate - trips.
The Presidents’ Panel invited Peter Baumgartner, CEO of Etihad Airways; Jennifer Cronin, president of Niccolo Hotels & Marco Polo Hotels; Katie Benson, regional vice president for Europe and general manager at the Jumeirah Group; Duncan O’Rourke, COO of luxury brands in Europe for Accor Hotels; Simon Palethorpe, senior vice president at Cunard; and Richard Singer, president of Travelzoo Europe, to discuss the challenges faced by their industry. US president Donald Trump’s laptop ban was among the problematic recent developments to be mentioned.
A later discussion saw entrepreneurs Philippe Brown, founder of Brown + Hudson; Rebecca Fielding, founder of Travel Unwrapped; and Aaron Simpson, co-founder and group executive chariman of Quintessentially, debate what it takes to make your business stand out from the competition. Levity came later, with presenters Tania Bryer and Charlotte Hawkins; restaurateur Jason Atherton; and politician and MEP Stanley Johnson speaking to the Telegraph's luxury travel editor, John O’Ceallaigh, about their best and worst travel experiences.
For Jason Atherton, a superb hotel restaurant is a prerequisite - he would check his family out and move elsewhere if his hotel’s proved inadequate - and perhaps unsurprisingly a decent gym is a necessity. Though a fearful flier, Charlotte Hawkins travels frequently to destinations such as the Maldives and Dubai, while Tania Bryer is continually on the move in her role as a broadcaster on CNBC. Stanley Johnson, an adventurer who at 17 years old - with just £40 to his name - undertook a six-month journey around South America, provided a unique take on what luxury travel entails by recounting intrepid trips to uncharted Australia, Antarctica and further afield.
