Aston Martin’s Unique Bond
Originally slated for release this week – we take you inside No Time To Die.
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The plan is laid bare in all its terrifying simplicity.
Take a classic 1960s Aston Martin DB5, drive along an absurdly narrow Italian alley. Pull the specially made handbrake at appropriate moment. Drift said DB5 into historic square at 145km/h. Do not kill one’s self, or, more importantly, damage the car. Repeat 20 or 30 times, if necessary, until perfection is achieved.
Mark Higgins is a man more than happy to oblige the above decree of ‘management’. As stunt driver and Daniel Craig body-double on the new 007 movie No Time To Die, that’s what he’s paid the big (ish) bucks to do. But first – and no childish sniggering at the back, please – he needs some coke. Otherwise there’s a real possibility that, on the notoriously slippery, dust-coated streets of Matera, the DB5 will simply slide into crunchy oblivion, taking out an ancient church along the way.
“Before filming, we spray the roads with Coca-Cola,” explains Higgins, a three-time British rally champion. “The difference it makes is amazing, increasing grip levels by about 70 per cent. All in all, we’ve spent £70,000 (around $135,000) on Coke for the roads.”
With his face dotted by ‘motion capture’ spots – a digital system that allows the special effects team to later overlay Daniel Craig’s slightly more famous visage – Higgins reveals other tricks used on No Time To Die; such as the minuscule ‘pods’ fixed to the cars’ roofs, allowing the stunt driver to sit up-top and take control of the vehicle while the talent sits below, pretending to drive.
“It’s more like driving a computer game,” Higgins says of this high-riding role. “The steering’s not direct and you feel like you’re going to roll over on every corner.”
Florence has its art and Rome, its architecture. But little-known Matera is proper fantasy Italy – the Europe that Australians pine for on cold, mid-winter days. It’s packed with impossibly thin, undulating cobbled streets; churches capable of melting the flintiest of atheist hearts; simple, seemingly shabby terraces a tenth of the size of a Sydney apartment yet with ten times the soul; buildings, pavements, façades, all brushed with a soft, sandstone palette. And that’s just the ‘newer’ bit.
The old, old part – and the reason Matera’s been granted UNESCO World Heritage Site bragging rights – has been inhabited for more than 12,000 years, and now lures savvy tourists who swoon over its tiny cave dwellings.
When Robb Report arrives on a warm Mediterranean morning for an exclusive insight into filming and how they come
to produce those epic car chases, it’s clear Matera’s days of flying under the radar are numbered.
The area around Piazza San Giovanni, where today’s action will be filmed, has been cordoned off to a perimeter of a few hundred metres – an assortment of Bond groupies and sightseers are gathered at one of the entry points.
To minimise production leaks, residents within the security zone have all signed non-disclosure agreements while Eon Productions, the British company behind the Bond series, has rented every apartment in the piazza for the duration of filming. The less beady iPhone eyes, the better. And hang the expense.
Nevertheless, cracks are appearing in this ring of security. Crystal-clear videos of car-chase scenes, captured in various parts of the old town during the previous three weeks have gone viral on social media, thickening the air of secrecy around what’s already one of the world’s most gossip-piquing movie sagas.
Little surprise, then, that we’re quickly ushered through security, onto the balcony of a three-storey house overlooking the piazza, and then politely asked not to wave our mobiles anywhere near the action taking place below. Fail to comply and we’ll be shot with poisoned umbrella darts. Maybe.
“This is the most challenging city I’ve worked in,” says stunt coordinator Lee Morrison, this his fifth Bond film. He designed and wrote all the car-chase sequences for No Time To Die.
“Matera is such an ancient place. I’ve had to drive around every location at the same speed I’m asking my stunt guys to do, thinking, ‘right, I need to protect that wall with a steel plate or some K-rail [temporary concrete barriers]’. We’ve had to go through so many requirements to get permission to film, but the local council has been very gracious with us.”
Morrison proceeds to outline today’s shoot schedule – first, a scene in which Bond and his love-interest, Madeleine Swann (French actress Léa Seydoux), are cornered in his DB5 by armed villains; in the afternoon, time permitting, the aforementioned high-speed, drifting-into-the-piazza sequence.
“You need stunt drivers with the ability to be extremely precise,” adds Morrison, “who understand what the camera is doing. You can get the fastest, most technical driver in the world, but they don’t understand they’ve only got four seconds to tell a story.”
As yet, no Coca-Cola is being poured onto the sandstone paving stones beneath us in the piazza, but other forms of movie sorcery are being summoned.
A posse of badly barbered Eurotrash villains are pointing machine guns at Bond’s DB5; sparks ping off the silver bodywork, a sight to force vicarious pain on any vintage-car fan. Except this is movie-land – a celluloid house of mirrors. Real bullets wouldn’t create those kind of sparks, so, instead, the special effects team use ‘squibs’, pellets of gunpowder that simulate ammunition.
The bad guys aren’t even firing them – that’s done by marksmen positioned out of camera shot. As for the bullet holes on the Aston’s flank and windscreen? Mere pieces of art.
When audiences watch Bond escape his foes by engaging the DB5’s headlamp-concealed Gatling guns (while performing a donut, no less), they’ll be oblivious to the analogue mechanics enabling this incredible piece of theatre – how the DB5 is laden with scaffolding poles and ropes to secure the huge IMAX camera filming the car point-of-view sequences; or how, to mimic the donut, four burly crew grab hold of the scaffolding and whirl the DB5 through 360 degrees.
All this time, effort, money, and Coca-Cola, for what will likely amount to about 10 to 15 seconds of useable footage when the movie is finally released to international audiences on April 2nd.
General plot details are being kept strictly under wraps (in a fortified nuclear bunker five kilometres beneath producer Barbara Broccoli’s mansion, most likely).
At the time of writing, only the bare bones have been made public: 007 puts retirement on ice to help locate a kidnapped scientist, only to find himself in the crosshairs of a deranged terrorist, played by Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody). What moviegoers can be certain of are heart-pumping fighting scenes, vaguely titillating nudity and loveable cheesy quips. All the addictive, basic foodstuff that’s helped the Bond universe gross around $16 billion since Ian Fleming’s literary spy made the leap from paper to film reel in 1962’s Dr No.
“The franchise survives because it loops all the things you like about Bond,” says second unit director Alexander Witt, known for his work on The Bourne Identity and Gladiator, among others. “But some people go just to see the cars.”
The roll-call of Bond rides is indeed deeply etched in both movie and automotive annals – from the sublime (the red Mercury Cougar XR7 in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) to the ridiculous (the Lotus Esprit half-car, half-submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me). But no car, no marque, can touch Aston Martin for pure Bond-ness.
Perhaps that’s why the latest movie comes across as an unabashed, pan-generational homage to the timelessly cool British brand, featuring a 1980s Vantage V8, the new DBS Superleggera, a sneak preview of the Valhalla hypercar (slated for showrooms in 2021) and, of course, the most iconic Bond car of them all, the DB5, first driven by Sean Connery in 1964’s Goldfinger.
In another stroke of movie cunning, the DB5 currently being filmed isn’t the only one of its kind. Eight DB5s have been assigned to No Time To Die, all built from the ground up by Aston Martin’s special-projects division, all completely driveable, all engineered to cope with the rigours of particular scenes, and all with a non-original-spec 268kW under the hood. The majority of them are being stored in the courtyard of a former convent just off the piazza, under the proud, watchful eye of the head of stunt cars, Neil Layton. “The challenge here in Matera is you’ve got five or six different road surfaces that you’re adjusting to all the time,” says Layton. “Once we receive the cars, we test, we rehearse and then we dial in each Aston for a specific scene.”
He singles out a DB5 only metres from where he’s standing. Its flank is scarred by an ugly crater, the result of being deliberately T-boned by a Range Rover Classic during recent filming. “It was painful to watch,” says Layton. “But we’ve done our bit by reinforcing the Aston inside so it can take multiple hits. But if you look at that Rangey…”
No amount of technical expertise, no amount of money (the No Time To Die budget around $366 million) can guarantee perfection on any set, as evidenced when the DB5’s Gatling guns have an unexplained hissy fit and spill hundreds of bullets onto the piazza. “Humans are involved, and humans make errors,” offers Higgins. “Film sets are a living thing, so stuff can happen.”
And it continues to do so. Throughout the afternoon, dark storm clouds dump their watery loads over Matera, calling a 30-minute halt to filming with each downpour. Eventually, we’re told by an Eon representative that the much-awaited drifting scene has been postponed until the next day – the daylight fading too fast for the lighting department’s liking.
The DB5 is duly wheeled into the courtyard for the night, the stunt boys stood down. And, for now at least, the Coca-Cola truck remains on stand-by.
After having its initial April 8 release date pushed back, No Time To Die is expected in cinemas 12 November 2020; astonmartin.com
This story comes from our latest Autumn 2020 issue. To purchase a copy or to sign up to an annual subscription of Robb Report Australia & New Zealand click here. To stay in touch with all the latest news click here.
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How the Most Rare and Valuable Watches Are Traded Among Elite Collectors
Some of the world’s most interesting watches spend decades being traded privately before we learn about them.
Before social media became the lingua franca of the watch world, there were forums. And on those forums, collectors—especially collectors of vintage Rolex—often traded timepieces amongst each other.
The advent of Instagram in the early 2010s, coupled with the explosion in interest in vintage timepieces, drew attention to this corner of the watch world, and with that attention came increased competition for the finest examples. In the case of six- and seven-figure watches, high-end dealers, like James Lamdin, founder and vice president of vintage and pre-owned watches at Analog:Shift, became trusted intermediaries, negotiating sales for pieces not once or twice but often multiple times as they made the rounds of the collector community.
“There are watches out there that may not be massively rare by reference, but are by example,” Lamdin tells Robb Report. “Tropical patina, ghosted bezel, or celebrity provenance—it’s that watch. When those watches go into a collection, usually it’s with the implicit understanding that they’re valuable and people will want them from you and will make you a profit when you sell them.”
The best dealers have built relationships with collectors around the world and often have first right of refusal when those pieces come back to market. But even still, the most coveted models can still slip through their fingers.
Eric Wind, of Wind Vintage in Palm Beach, Fla., has lost and found some of the world’s most storied watches. In 2015, when he was vice president, senior specialist at Christie’s in New York, Wind came across a “super rare” 1957 Audemars Piguet Ref. 5516 perpetual calendar that had languished in rural Florida until the nephew of the original owner consigned it to Christie’s. The first perpetual calendar wristwatch to feature a leap-year indicator, the piece was one of just nine made by Audemars Piguet in the 1950s. Wind considers it “the one in the best condition.”
He showed it to one of Christie’s better-known clients, Patrick Getreid, owner of the OAK Collection, who purchased it in 2015 for $545,000. In 2023, Getreid consigned it to Christie’s in Hong Kong. That’s when Wind decided to give the piece another shot.
“I had registered to bid on it but at the last minute, I got cold feet,” Wind continues. “It was starting kind of high compared with what Getreide had paid for it. I was bidding remotely from Florida, but when no one else is bidding, you’re kind of wondering if you’re a genius or a fool. Is there something everyone else knows that I don’t? The question was about market value. The watch ended up passing and I purchased it via private sale—or private treaty, as it’s known—after the sale. I had two clients who really wanted it. I offered it to both, but one was more ready to pull the trigger and he got it. It never saw the light of day.” That Audemars Piguet perpetual calendar, Wind says, “remains one of my top five watches on the planet.”
As he reflected on the piece’s winding journey, Wind considered his own role in its comings and goings. “It was fun to be part of the lifecycle of that watch, from when it was discovered in rural Florida and consigned to Christie’s, and then sold to a great collector, who sold it again,” he says. “I imagine it will come back to me at some point. I don’t know if it will be two years from now or 40 years.”
Another grail watch that Wind helped shepherd to a client was an exceptional Paul Newman Rolex Daytona Panda reference 2623 with a full set and a tropical dial that was sold by a small Swedish auction house just under a decade ago. “Another dealer got it,” Wind explains. “I was still at Christie’s, and I fell in love with the watch. This dealer who had it for a year then sold it to an Italian dealer, who then sold it to a collector in Asia. I was tracking the watch on Instagram and saw the collector post it. By that time, I had become a dealer.
“I made an offer to the collector to purchase it on behalf of my client,” he adds. “It had been owned by a Swedish boat captain and had been given to him by the family he worked for, the equivalent of the Rockefellers in Sweden. We had to arrange shipment to the U.S. by Malca-Amit armored transport. Whenever these high-value watches move around, you have to deal with armored shipments, customs, proper transportation, and a lot of paperwork. It takes some time but it’s well worth it.”
Both the AP perpetual calendar and Daytona were original and unpolished—“the kind of watches I look for,” Wind says. “It’s funny how watches circle around. Within the high-end watch world, we’re not talking about thousands and thousands of watches. We’re talking about a relatively small amount of great watches.”
Eric Ku, a high-end vintage dealer in Northern California, certainly knows the drill.
About 15 years ago, he was offered a first-of-its-kind 1996 Rolex Cosmograph Daytona “Rainbow” reference 16599 in white gold on a leather strap.
“I’ve been hunting jeweled Rolexes for a really long time, before it was a cool thing,” Ku, cofounder of the online auction site Loupe This, says. “The watch first surfaced to me around 15 years ago. It was offered to me by a dealer in the Middle East and was coming from, allegedly, a member of a royal family. At the time, the pricing was completely different than it is today. After going back and forth, I offered $130,500 and the seller wanted $136,462. I lost the watch. I was gutted. I’d been stalking the watch. But at the time, relative to the market, it didn’t make sense for me. It was a really tough time, might have been around the financial crisis. I felt confident it would come back to me, but it didn’t.
“Then, in 2012, Rolex introduced its new rainbow Daytona,” Ku says. “I had no doubt about the authenticity of the watch I’d lost out on, but seeing the new rainbow Daytona completely validated me and erased any scintilla of a doubt that I had about the watch. Fast forward a couple years: The watch was offered to me again privately, by a different person in the Middle East at a significant multiple of the original offering—let’s say in the mid six-figures. I bought it.”
In 2017, Ku sold the watch to an important collector based overseas, “a person of very high taste and connoisseurship who appreciated the rarity of that watch,” he says. The collector, by Ku’s reckoning, also appreciated the story of its journey. “Dealers and old collectors always like trading war stories,” he says. “What’s the one thing that got away and then it came back? The collector got sold on the story.”
Now, the watch is coming back to market on Nov. 8 at Phillips Geneva, where it’s being offered in a sale dedicated to neo-vintage timepieces (Reloaded: The Rebirth of Mechanical Watchmaking 1980-1999) and is estimated to fetch in excess of $5.93 million.
“It’s probably the sexiest watch of the season,” Ku says.
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Champagne Bollinger Just Released a Limited-Edition, James Bond–Inspired Bubbly
The Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition comes with its own carrying case and glasses.
When it comes to drinks, James Bond may be best associated with a martini—shaken, not stirred, of course. But the secret agent has been known to enjoy a glass or two of bubbly as well.
Champagne Bollinger has long been the Champagne of choice for Bond, and now the house is honouring that relationship with a special-edition bottle that commemorates the 60th anniversary of Goldfinger.
Whether you’re a Bond fan or a Champagne connoisseur, the $5,950 Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition package is meant to appeal to both sensibilities.
The star of the show is the Champagne, of course: Here, Champagne Bollinger is offering a 2007 vintage Magnum, made from hand-picked grapes and aged 17 years in the house’s cellars. Spicy aromas on the nose are contrasted with notes of fruit, brioche, and honey. The Champagne has been packaged in a bespoke Globe-Trotter Air Cabin Case and comes with four Champagne Bollinger 007 glasses in which to enjoy the bubbly. Limited to just 200 individually numbered pieces, it’s a true collector’s item.
Champagne Bollinger has enjoyed a lengthy relationship with the James Bond franchise, dating back to when Roger Moore popped the first bottle in 1973’s Live and Let Die. Since then, the two have become almost inseparable, and Champagne Bollinger is proudly being served at the very first official James Bond bar, which just opened in London. If you can’t snag the limited-edition set for yourself, you can at least imbibe in a glass of the good stuff at the 007 at Burlington Arcade.
That bar and the special Champagne Bollinger package are all part of the festivities celebrating 1964’s Goldfinger. The film and Bond’s ensuing legacy have established him as one of the biggest (fictional) names in the luxury world, with his love of expensive watches, fast cars, and fine spirits.
While it’s unlikely that many of us can channel the special agent when it comes to his escapades and hijinks, we should delight in the fact that we can embrace our inner Bond by sidling up to the 007 bar or throwing back a glass of the Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition. It’s exactly how our favorite M16 agent would want us to honour him.
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Golden Touch
Discretion is the better part of glamour at the glittering Maybourne Beverly Hills.
Los Angeles does not want for star wattage, but for years now, the city’s hotel scene has been a little lacklustre. So news that the beloved Montage hotel has been completely redone under the Maybourne brand (the British powerhouse that operates Claridge’s, The Connaught, and Berkeley Hotels in London, and the recently opened Maybourne Riviera on the Côte d’Azur) should come as a boon to Australians looking for a new Tinseltown bolthole.
Situated within Beverly Hills’ famous Golden Triangle, just north of Wilshire Boulevard and Four Season’s Beverly Wilshire, and one block from the world-renowned luxury retailers, restaurants and celeb-spotting of Rodeo Drive, The Maybourne Beverly Hills offers a chic retreat from the designer flexing at its doorstep; a rare escape in the heart of this storied enclave that flies under the radar like a cap-wearing celeb dodging the paparazzi.
Set amid the manicured, Mediterranean-style Beverly Cañon Gardens plaza, which unfolds from the hotel’s west entrance, the new incarnation of Montage Beverly Hills (55 suites and 20 private residences, each with a balcony or patio with a courtyard or city view) still evokes the grand estates of Old Hollywood while feeling like you’re in a European mainstay.
Revealing a restrained new guestroom and suite design by Bryan O’Sullivan, a blue-chip art collection and some of the most solicitous staff in town, the Maybourne speaks in a laid-back Californian accent but still holds true to the luxury touchpoints of five-star service for which one of the world’s most exclusive neighbourhoods—and hotel brands—is known.
“It’s reassuringly British when it comes to service—it’s a culture of yes,” says Linden Pride, the Australian restaurant and bar owner behind the award-winning Caffe Dante in New York and Bobbie’s, the new speakeasy opening this month below Neil Perry’s new Song Bird restaurant in Sydney’s Double Bay (page 40). Pride should know; he lived at the Maybourne for almost a year while he and his partner, Nathalie Hudson, set up Dante, the stunning new restaurant and bar on the hotel’s ninth-floor rooftop. “Looking out from the roof onto lemon and olive trees, it’s easy to forget that you’re in Southern California, not Europe.”
Opened last year, Dante has quickly become one of the hottest reservations in town, luring in celebrities from Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin to the entire Real Madrid soccer team. Like its sister outposts in New York (besides the Greenwich Village original, a West Village location opened in 2020), the focus here is on non-threatening antipasti and aperitivi in a produce-driven menu of fresh familiar stalwarts, with the addition of wood-fired dishes from a giant pizza oven at the heart of the room. Just as it does in New York, a negroni cart does the rounds, and each afternoon is welcomed with a martini happy hour.
It’s all fittingly Cali-chill. The only drama in the place is a striking ceiling fresco by Los Angeles artist Abel Macias, which dominates the 146-seat room. “Nathalie and I had just been to Europe when we decided to open up here,” Pride recalls, “and the Sistine Chapel blew us away. When we saw the domed ceiling in this room it was a no-brainer.”
Dante joins a string of newcomers in the area, including New York transplants Café Boulud, Marea and Cipriani. Don’t look now, but with arrivals like the Maybourne and Dante, one of the world’s stuffiest cities—yes, Beverly Hills is its own 14.8 km² metropolis—might just be entering a new golden age.
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Hibiki 40 Year Old Resets the Bar for One of Whisky’s Most Exalted Names
The legendary blender reasserts itself in the industry’s uppermost pantheon with its oldest and rarest blended release ever.
Over the last decade, whiskies from Suntory’s famed Hibiki stable have gone from a top-shelf staple to the new byword for luxury in the increasingly rarefied world of Japanese whisky. As stocks of its famed age statement blends drew ever lower, the air of exclusivity around the distillery grew and grew – something that has stuck around even as the brand’s new flagship blend, Harmony, became more readily available once more.
It’s becoming clearer, however, that Hibiki still has a few exceptional tricks up its sleeves. Twenty-one and 30-year-old age statement whiskies have released in the past few years to critical acclaim, confirming that Suntory still has some particularly rarefied output yet to unveil. Now, in the brand’s boldest move yet, a 40-year-old blend is set to hit the market in extremely limited quantities, taking Hibiki’s already lofty benchmarks of rarity and lineage to new heights.
As with Hibiki’s other blends, Suntory’s Chief Blender, Shinji Fukuyo, has spent years perfecting a blend that brings some of Japan’s oldest and finest spirits into perfect harmony – achieving a smoothness and complexity that takes the brand’s hallmark qualities to a new plane. Single malts from Yamazaki, Hakushu, and Chita all feature, having been individually aged for four decades to form a true expression of the place they were made, before making their way into the final blend.
Truly a multi-generational blend, Hibiki 40 Year Old is designed not just as an expression of the skills and expertise passed down through generations of individual distillers, but that of Fukuyo’s forebears, legendary Suntory blenders Shingo and Shinjiro Torii.
The result is a final liquid rich with sweet fresh fruit, light citrus zest, and spice, supported by a luxurious undercurrent of acacia honey and dried fruit. Each crystal bottle is adorned with a mother-of-pearl inlay and decorated with a handcrafted label from Japanese washi artist Eriko Horiki.
While age statement single malts in the four- and five-decade category have become increasingly the vogue in recent years, never before has a blended whisky been attempted with such old stock—a unique challenge for its maker.
“Behind the elegance and bloom that is typical of Hibiki, there is a sense of subduedness,
like that of an old temple, and a wabi-sabi patina due to the long aging process,” says Fukuyo. “I would like people to enjoy the pure and pure aroma that has been sharpened over the years; the tranquility of old temples and storehouses and the nostalgic warm feeling that accompanies them.”
Limited to just 400 bottles, Hibiki 40 Year Old will release on October 4th, with bottles retailing at $75,000.
Australian fans of the brand will have the unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the Hibiki 40 Year Old experience, including a taste of the exalted liquid, at an exclusive event at Clare Smyth’s Oncore on October 24th, 2025. Tickets are available for $1,800 per person.
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White Lotus-ing? How Hit Films and TV Shows Are Inspiring Elite Travelers to ‘Set-Jet’ Across the Globe
It’s not just The White Lotus. Prestige TV and blockbuster films set in far-flung destinations are driving bookings like never before.
“As seen on TV” may have lowbrow connotations, but the recent glut of award-winning shows and films set in alluring, far-flung locations is causing an unprecedented run on the world’s best hotels. Call it set-jetting: planning your vacation around a destination featured in a popular series or movie. And while romantic suites and beloved characters have gotten people on planes since the golden age of film, what has changed is how central beautiful venues have become to plots.
“The way that The White Lotus used the destination to tell the story was really unique,” says Misty Belles, an executive at the global travel-adviser network Virtuoso. It also made its settings—the Four Seasons resorts in Maui and Taormina, Sicily—nigh un-bookable. And it’s hardly the only example: “Paris wasn’t hurting for eyes, but Emily in Paris showed the city in a more playful way,” Belles notes. “And people weren’t exactly flocking to Richmond before Ted Lasso.”
Giulia Parmigiani/Netflix
The trend is so strong that a property doesn’t even need to be connected to a show to benefit from its boom. Henley Vazquez, cofounder of the New York–based travel agency Fora, points to Bridgerton’s impact on English estate hotels.
“Heckfield Place [used to be] a hard sell,” she says of the five-star Georgian mansion in Hampshire. “Now, people are dying to go there. It wasn’t featured in Bridgerton, but it’s just that kind of place.”
Others insist on the real deal. Jennifer Schwartz, managing director of Authentic Explorations, works with one family to build trips based on the Game of Thrones universe.
HBO
“They went out of their way in Portugal” to visit Monsanto, the setting for Dragonstone in House of the Dragon, she notes. “It’s definitely a criterion on which they choose where they want to vacation.”
For travelers who want more than simply to follow in their favorite character’s footsteps, London’s Black Tomato takes things several steps further. Since 2023, it has planned high-octane itineraries based on the James Bond franchise and works with the films’ producers, Eon Productions, to make you feel like an MI6 agent. (Some trips even offer lessons with Daniel Craig’s stunt double, Lee Morrison.)
The 007 success has inspired more such trips. “We’ve just recently launched itineraries inspired by Yellowstone and Ripley, focusing on Montana and Wyoming and Italy, respectively,” says cofounder Tom Marchant.
Netflix
Still, it’s important to remember that sharp camerawork—and editing—accounts for a lot of the on-screen magic. Schwartz, of Authentic Explorations, notes that “the White Lotus hotel” in Sicily is “not super accessible, but it’s filmed as if the beach is right there.” In reality, the shore club from the show’s second season is 133 miles away. “People go to the place and they’re like, ‘You have to get in a car to go to the beach? What do you mean?’ ”
So where shouldn’t you go? Netflix’s The Perfect Couple will likely send hordes to Nantucket next summer, and The White Lotus’s third season, set on the Thai island Koh Samui, has already caused a local spike—and it’s not even on the air yet.
Bookings of Virtuoso’s properties in the region are up 38 percent since the show was announced. Luckily, Belles says, the effect doesn’t linger. “We typically see a good two-year impact on a set-jetting destination.”
