Fitness executive Jim Worthington had one goal for the luxury trip he was planning to celebrate the birthday of his girlfriend, Kim Levins: privacy. “I wanted to be 100 percent away from everybody,” he says from his office in Bucks County, Pa. “It was her 30th birthday, and I didn’t want to share it with anybody but her.”

So he booked the couple into Gladden Private Island, a tiny hotel off the coast of Belize that opened in December. It consists of a single two-bedroom villa. The island “is less than an acre. You could walk from one tip to the other, and it would take less than 30 seconds,” he says, laughing. “It was like being Robinson Crusoe—you have no idea the staff is even there.”

He and Levins spent their days enjoying the solitude, sitting at the edge of the water for four or five hours straight, saying perhaps three words.

“The beauty of where you are is unbelievable,” Worthington says. Indeed, the two were so impressed that they’re planning to make the island a regular vacation spot, taking a week to decompress there every 18 months or so.

It might sound like a risky proposition: rather than a vacation villa, a personal hotel with a full cadre of staff to cater to a couple’s every whim (from $2,950 per night for two, all-inclusive). But this is the hottest new niche in high-end travel—not a penthouse suite but an entire island just for you.

Gladden is the brainchild of Chris Krolow, the host of HGTV’s Island Hunters, who’s spent the past 20 years selling and leasing private islands. “It’s my baby,” he says. The idea was simple: Create the ultimate couples-only (make that: couple-only) hotel, a luxe hideaway for barefoot sojourners at which all evidence of other humans is concealed.

Set on a pair of mangrove-fringed islands a few miles off the southern coast of Belize, Gladden is accessible from the capital, Belize City, itself a nonstop flight from several hubs in North America. From there it’s a 30-minute helicopter transfer to the resort, making Gladden workable as a long weekend getaway.

The setting is superb. The coast of this Central American nation is fringed with a low-lying archipelago of more than 400 atolls set in crystal blue waters reminiscent of the Maldives or the South Pacific.

“This part of Belize is insanely beautiful. It’s like a jewelry box of blue all the way around,” Krolow says. “The color, the clarity of the water—it’s like nowhere on the planet.”

First « 1 2 » Next