Meet Steph Wetherell
CO-FOUNDER
Steph’s career in luxury travel has been shaped by a lifelong love of discovering the world and the people within it. Growing up across several countries with her diplomatic family gave her an early appreciation for different cultures, which she turned into a career at one of the UK’s leading luxury tour operators soon after university.
After moving to Singapore more than a decade ago, Steph went on to lead teams at some of the region’s top travel agencies and built a trusted global network of partners. Her experience spans all seven continents, and she is a regular at the world’s leading luxury travel trade shows.
Day to day, Steph oversees the company’s back-end operations and manages supplier relationships, ensuring every detail behind the scenes supports the seamless service clients experience. She is also an active voice in the industry, having served on Hilton’s Luxury Brands Advisory Board and the Board of LHW in APAC, and has been recognised as a Condé Nast Travel Specialist for two years running.
3 Questions With Steph:
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The travel industry can be both the most frustrating and rewarding place to work – fortunately in my experience it is usually the latter! Arranging trips for clients to places they never dreamt of and opening doors to experiences they never thought possible is very special, and getting feedback saying you’ve arranged the trip of a lifetime is what keeps us going. On the flip side, we are on call 24/7 and at the end of the day things can go wrong which are out of our control but it’s our job to fix them. Flight delays, missed transfers, natural disasters, strikes…we’ve seen it all!
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Any trip that exceeds my clients’ expectations is special, but if I had to pick one it would be a completely off the beaten track journey through Southern Ethiopia I arranged for a client. This was by no means luxury in the traditional sense, but we managed to get access to some tribal events which are virtually never seen by tourists. Staying overnight with a tribe deep in the Omo Valley, sacrificing a goat with a family ahead of their son’s bull jumping ritual the following morning (when he goes from being a boy to a man) and exploring such a remote part of the world was exactly what my client was looking for. These sorts of things are only possible thanks to the amazing teams we work with locally across the globe.
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I’m a fairly adventurous traveler and have been to almost 80 countries, but top of my bucket list would be Namibia, Rwanda, Bhutan, Antarctica and Costa Rica…I’d also love to do a city break in Seoul.