The Luxury Hotel Whisperer

06.05.2024 - 16:55 / forbes.com

‘She’ll come to your hotel, looking incredibly elegant, charm everyone and then at 4am you’ll get an email full of highly insightful suggestions because she’s also a farmer’s daughter and she works around the clock.’

James McBride, co-founder and owner of multi award-winning Nihi hotels and whose C.V. has included helming a roster of luxury hotels that include the Carlyle and the YTL group, is talking to me from Nihi Sumba in Indonesia. He’s a long-time client of Julia Perowne’s.

‘Did you know that after Jules graduated from university, she was turned down by M.I.6? [the U.K. Intelligence Service] They missed a trick there,’ he adds.

After rising through the ranks of luxury travel PR in the 1990s, Perowne International - with offices in London, New York and Milan - has been responsible for leading the publicity for the biggest hotel openings of recent years, including Raffles OWO in London, which is owned by the Hinduja family and the upcoming Hotel du Couvent in Nice. Perowne also represents major European hotel groups, including the Oetker Collection that has both Hotel du Cap Eden Roc and Eden Rock in St Barths in its portfolio. She also works with Passalacqua, which was named the world’s best hotel in last year’s 50 Best awards.

Increasingly, hotels come to Perowne for not just PR representation but also sales and branding. ‘If they have any sense, a hotel brings her on board long before it opens. Her design advice is second to none. She has saved me from some really expensive mistakes,’ says one hotelier who declined to be named.

Perowne now also has teams who will create magazines and digital marketing. She also has a podcast, Unpacked, which discusses travel trends.

“In a world where most PRs simply bash out a press release and bill the client, Jules does things so differently, says Susan D’Arcy of the Sunday Times. 'Few people have a better understanding of what makes luxury travel tick. Above all, she knows the difference between expensive and exceptional and doesn't waste her time with places that are just the former.’

‘She knows that these days it’s not enough to just have an amazing hotel in a beautiful setting. Amazing things have to happen too. And she was aware of that long before others in luxury travel,’ says Jules Maury, who heads up Scott Dunn Private, the exclusive, invitation-only arm of the Scott Dunn travel company.

Married and with a young son, downtime is spent in Norfolk, a remote part of East England where, you can walk for miles on deserted beaches, meeting no one except for a member of the Royal Family (the king has a base at Sandringham, the Prince and Princess of Wales at nearby Anmer Hall) but she’s in Barbados when I catch up with her by telephone.

‘I really fear for