What The Luxe S3E2: ‘In The Moment’ Travel with Tom Marchant, Co-Founder of Black Tomato

2023 is the year ‘transformative travel’ really began to make headway, claiming the top spot in many a trend report. It’s unsurprising then that Black Tomato – a tailor-made luxury travel company – was named one of the world’s best travel specialists in Condé Nast Traveller’s Readers’ Choice Awards. 

Co-founded by friends and seasoned travellers, James Merrett, Matt Smith and our guest Tom Marchant, Black Tomato is a trailblazer of pioneering travel products, designed to uncover rare ways to experience destinations – well-known or untrodden – and reflect every passion, obsession and desire. Standouts include ‘Get Lost’, ‘Blink,’ ‘Bring It Back’ and their most recent innovation: ‘See You In The Moment’. 

To them, experience-led travel is about “the pursuit of feeling”; this idea that travel is a catalyst for great adventures of connection, with people just as much as place. Born from the brand’s innovation council, Black Tomato launches a new product line every two years or so to reflect how the high net worth wants to travel. Adversaries of the traditional market’s naval-gazing, the team goes outside of category often in their thinking to pull in human truths and insight that then inform their products.

‘See You In The Moment’ is rooted in the brand’s long-held belief that some experiences are “exponentially more meaningful and memorable when shared with those you love”. That belief inspired them to review the best and worst parts of group travel and develop a new range of pick-and-mix experiences which take place at specific places and points in time. Categorised into The Meal, The Event, The Challenge, The Journey and The Celebration, these shared moments are designed for families and friends who want to commit to carving out time to do remarkable things with those who matter.

In under an hour, Tom and What The Luxe host Fred Moore cover a vast range of topics from the behavioural psychology of U/HNW travellers and pandemic-induced value shifts to the role of AI, the story behind the name and how new lenses can deliver moments of unexpected wonder.

Listen to all that and more right now wherever you get your podcasts.

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