The Best Luxury Experiences Leave Some Slack in the System
Photo Credit: Eleven Deplar Farm, a lodge in Iceland. Eleven Experiences
Skift Take
The marketing from luxury's top brands has blurred into one seamless, forgettable product. The operators pulling away are the ones who figured out that friction is the point.
On Experience
Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. You can read all of his writing here.To build the ice luge, the general manager got into a helicopter with a chainsaw.
The guests were a group of American college friends who had bought out Eleven Deplar Farm, the 13-room lodge that sits on a converted sheep farm in Iceland's Fljót Valley, to celebrate a 40th birthday. They wanted a night that felt like a 1990s party.
Kurt Berman, who runs the place for Eleven, could have phoned down for a bag of ice. Instead, he flew his guide-operations manager up into the mountains above the valley, found an alpine lake that doesn't melt in summer, hacked out a block of ice that had been frozen for millennia, flew it back down, and carved it into a luge. At four in the morning, a group of adults who had long since made their money were drinking vodka poured through ice older than agriculture, with a playlist from 1995.
"You can't think that stuff up if you don't have the resources or the impetus to do it," Berman told me. He's right, but the res
