At Bloomberg Pursuits, we love to travel. And we always want to make sure we’re doing it right. So we’re talking to globe-trotters in all of our luxury fields—food, wine, fashion, cars, real estate—to learn about their high-end hacks, tips, and off-the-wall experiences. These are the Distinguished Travel Hackers.
René Gross Kærskov is co-chief executive officer of Hirsch Bedner Associates, the world’s top hospitality design firm with 23 offices and 1,500 employees worldwide. The Danish-born Kærskov has spent almost three decades with the company, joining it in 1990 as an office clerk in HBA’s London office in 1990.
HBA’s notable projects include the Mandarin Oriental hotel in New York, L.A.’s Beverly Hills Hotel, and the Four Seasons in Beijing.
Kærskov lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children, age 12 and 14, but travels some 150,000 to 200,000 miles every year. Here are the best things he's learned.
The secret to never leaving anything behind in a hotel room again:
“I am extremely organized. As soon as I get to my hotel room, I line up what I need for the next day: underwear, socks, shirt, toothbrush, vitamins, all in a line and ready to go. I don’t unpack other than that at all, because I live out of a suitcase—on Sunday, for example, I go to Asia and visit five cities in five days, so I only take out what I need for the next day."
The best airport for a stopover (and the snacks to buy when you get there):
“I always use Narita for a stopover—Delta routes me that way. And I love it because they have green tea[-flavored] everything. Even green tea Kit Kat chocolate—and that’s one of my weaknesses. For the same reason, I love Copenhagen, where they have a lot of candies and chocolates I recognize from when I was a kid, like Johan Bülow licorice, which is made from organic raw materials. And of course, I like the Danish pastries there, because they’re made properly, by a Danish baker, and they use the proper butter: salted Lurpak. You can taste the Lurpak.”
The best place in the world to try parachuting (if you’re only going to do it once):
“I think I am an adventurous traveler, but I like to take calculated risks. My wife, she said, ‘I’ll let you parachute once,’ so I parachuted at the North Pole. It was on March 31, to help promote the World Wildlife Foundation [where Kærskov is a presidium member in Denmark]. Parachuting at the North Pole is risky because the nearest hospital is 6,000 miles away. When I landed on a little Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean, I met the Russians who were flying the helicopter I’d be jumping from. They couldn’t find the parachutes, and when they did find some on a shelf, they had to clean the floors to roll out the parachutes and fold them up. I was a little bit worried in the last 10 minutes or so before the tandem jump, but afterwards, we celebrated. I had a bunch of Russians around me on the ice doing high fives. I had no idea what they were saying.