Other than at your wedding, when else will you have the chance to bring everyone you love under one roof to celebrate and toast and laugh into the early hours of the night?
Most people would say never. But some travel insiders beg to differ.
People nowadays “want to get together and celebrate, whether it’s a graduation, or a birthday, or a wedding”, says Frederik Vidal, the general manager of Rosewood’s Las Ventanas, a five-star resort in Los Cabos, Mexico. “They’ll take any reason to throw a party.” And by throw a party, he means really throw a party – and buy out a whole resort.
While it may be a newer trend in the West, ultra-rich Arab partygoers have been commandeering entire islands for some time.
Last July, for instance, the Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman al Saud, arrived in the Maldives for a star-studded celebration which is reported to have cost upwards of US$8 million, according to Private Island News.
Prince Mohammed was understood to have taken over Velaa Private Island for an extravagant two-week stay in the tiny Indian Ocean republic. He also bought-out nearby Cheval Blanc Randheli as a base for his extensive staff and support team.
While the complete list of the celebrities lined up to perform at the event was unknown, both the rapper Pitbull and Gangnam Star Psy were sighted boarding a seaplane with the airport representative of Cheval Blanc Randheli at the time.
That jaunt, however, paled by comparison with Saudi Arabia’s then Crown Prince and now King, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who a year earlier commandeered not one, but three entire Maldives island resorts for himself and his royal entourage.
It is believed he was in residence on the resorts for almost a month, at a cost of £18m (Dh80.4m), splitting his time between three of the South Male Atoll’s most stunning private island hideaways: the Anantara Veli; the Anantara Dighu; and Naladhu Private Island – one of the brightest jewels of the Maldives Republic.
A local-based blog, Maldives Finest, also suggested that the King's stunning 78-metre-long superyacht, Tueq, was present, as well as a high-tech floating medical centre and more than 100 specially-trained personal bodyguards.
Other resorts have seen an upturn in block bookings. Jumby Bay, another Rosewood Resort, this one in Antigua, hosted twice the number of birthday buyouts in 2015 than it did in 2014 and is on track to surpass that number in 2016.
In the United States, The Mayflower Grace, in Connecticut, has seen birthday buyouts quadruple in the past two years – and is launching spa packages for feted guests to encourage that growth to continue. At the Lodge at Glendorn, in Pennsylvania, birthday buyouts have cost as much as $200,000. Most of these properties are reporting such strong birthday business, it is edging out weddings entirely.
For Jack Ezon, an industry expert and travel specialist at Ovation Vacations, birthday bashes are “the biggest growth market. Among the parties he has planned were a $3.5m spectacle in London that took over Claridge’s and included private events at Buckingham Palace and Spencer House. He has flown in disk jockeys to private islands in the Caribbean, set up Olympic-style family competitions, chartered yachts, and sent groups on birthday safaris.
Mr Ezon estimates that he books 50 such parties a year – with one-fifth of them costing upward of $1m. The 60th birthday party of the now disgraced Arcadia group chairman Philip Green cost a reported a $5m to $6m at Rosewood Mayakoba on the Riviera Maya in Mexico that included live performances by Stevie Wonder.
At Las Ventanas – a soulful village of whitewashed adobe casitas on the Sea of Cortes in the South American country – birthday buyouts can range in size. Most often, Mr Vidal sees groups of 10 or 12 taking over a block of suites or villas, typically for a total of $30,000 per day. Only once did he book all 84 suites and villas on property to a single birthday boy – a Texas man who clearly believed in his state’s motto of doing everything bigger. His group, says Mr Vidal, stayed for a three-night weekend, ringing up a bill that probably hovered in the low seven figures.
While Mr Vidal says that “there’s no limit” on what you can spend, he firmly believes these parties are not meant to be ostentatious in any way.
“It’s less about showing off,” he says, “and more about bringing people together”. He says older celebrants will use birthdays as an excuse to reunite the whole family; younger guests swap relatives for friends who are scattered across the country most days of the year.
“They’ll all fly down in one or two planes – and a lot of them are flying private. From California, it’s not that far,” Mr Vidal says. And once they are all together, he will coordinate group activities, everything from pampering at the spa, to guided wine tastings in a villa, to ATV outings in the desert.
Ira Bloom, the chief executive of Ani Villas, meanwhile, has built an entire collection of “private resorts” around the idea of destination parties. The first opened in 2011 in Anguilla; two more opened last year in Thailand and Sri Lanka. He plans to open his fourth resort next summer in the Dominican Republic. All are like villas on steroids – gorgeous, exclusive-use compounds built with the aesthetic and ambition of Aman resorts, where clusters of suites have access to pools, a spa, chef services, excursions and, in one case, even a waterslide.
Mr Bloom says multi-generational reunions make up about half of his bookings and that birthday parties represent about one-sixth of his business. Weddings, on the other hand, are the occasion for one in 10 bookings. The average price of a birthday buyout is $50,000 for five nights for a group of 20, all-inclusive.
“Most often, we see 40th birthday parties for the wives and 50th birthday parties for the husbands,” he says.
For hoteliers, birthday buyouts are covetable business. Not only do they come with major price tags – they are also likely to spawn sequels. Several couples that booked 50th birthdays at the Lodge at Glendorn, for instance, have returned 10 years later for 60th birthday parties. Weddings are in theory once in a lifetime; milestone birthdays can make for twice-a-decade traditions.
Ultimately, these parties are not just about an epic birthday celebration. They are about a broader desire for quality time and togetherness. That is why Peter Dauterman, a member of Exclusive Resorts who last year threw a milestone birthday party for his wife at the Four Seasons Peninsula Papagayo, has decided to turn the family reunion into an annual tradition – no occasion needed.
“What surprised us was that the family came together on this trip in a way that they hadn’t since they were kids,” he says. “It was really more than we expected.”
* with Bloomberg
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