Author: Nic Bailey
Luxury travel in the Cape Winelands has moved towards estates that hold an entire day within one boundary: breakfast on a private terrace, a tasting in the cellar, dinner at a marble sommelier bar, an ...
Affluent travellers have grown wary of novelty for its own sake. Many now choose hotels with a long record, where the staff know the room numbers and the kitchen has had decades to refine its ...
Luxury travel once measured itself in room counts, floor area and the length of a wine list. Across South Africa that measure is shifting. In June, Eat Out reported that chefs around the country are ...
The 2026 Virtuoso Luxe Trend Report notes that food and drink are often the reason a destination is chosen at all. Italy, Japan, Greece, France and Croatia head its list of most requested destinations, each ...
The upper end of the safari market rewards continuity. Lodges that hold their standing year after year tend to share a few traits: small guest numbers, few vehicles on the tracks, and a sense of ...
Time has become the scarcest ingredient at the Cape table. Across the winelands, estates are bringing older vintages out of the cellar and setting them beside the food, so that age sits on the menu ...
Plug-in hybrids have settled into a clear role in the premium SUV market. Owners who spend part of the week in city traffic want to cover it on battery, and for the remainder they want ...
Hotel guides have begun to borrow the discipline of restaurant guides. Inspectors visit anonymously, select independently and judge each stay against a fixed set of criteria. The 2026 MICHELIN Guide hotel selection lists 78 properties ...
Across South Africa’s most established wine regions, a quiet reordering of hospitality is under way. Where the working wine farm was once a place to taste and depart, a select group of estates has begun ...
Across the world’s most serious wine regions, the estate restaurant has become as central to reputation as the bottle itself, a shift that rewards producers willing to treat food with the same precision applied to ...
There was a time when a certain kind of car did the talking before its owner said a word. The badge, the paint, the height off the ground – all built to be seen from ...
Heritage cuisines have spent the past decade moving out of family kitchens and into rooms with linen tablecloths and wine lists. Filipino cooking now appears on tasting menus in London, Ethiopian technique has found its ...
The line between working, socialising and unwinding has thinned considerably for South Africa’s affluent, and a new category of address has emerged to hold all three at once. It is not the home, nor the ...
For much of the past two decades, luxury hospitality measured itself in scale: soaring lobbies, oversized chandeliers, marble atriums built to photograph well before they were built to live in. That language is fading. Across ...
South Africa’s high-net-worth buyers have quietly redirected a portion of their wealth from art and yachts toward something closer to home: performance vehicles kept, driven and stored within reach of the coast. Where once a ...
Across South Africa’s safari lodges, the kitchen has quietly become as much a draw as the game drive. Where menus once defaulted to steak and starch to satisfy travellers after a long day in an ...
Across the world’s wealth capitals, the private club has quietly reasserted itself as the defining marker of urban status – not the car in the driveway or the table at the it-restaurant, but the door ...
As spring approaches and South Africa’s hospitality calendar moves into a new season, the hotel restaurant is becoming a more serious destination in its own right. The old assumption that a hotel dining room exists ...
There is a particular pleasure in taking to the road when the Cape turns towards spring. From 1 September, the light changes, the vineyards begin their seasonal shift and the long, polished days invite a ...
There is a particular kind of restraint that separates true luxury travel from its imitators, and nowhere is that distinction clearer than on a coastal road driven slowly, in a car built for exactly that ...
