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.
Melissa Biggs Bradley is the founder of luxury travel firm Indagare. The membership-based travel club is the secret weapon of 1 Percenters, known for planning and arranging near-impossible trips from chartering planes and yachts to overnights at billionaires’ private islands.
When not planning others’ jaunts, Biggs Bradley herself spends between 3½ and 4 months on the road each year, flying around 200,000 miles. “I’m not really loyal to any airline—to me the most important thing is the convenience of the time,” she says, though she recommends Delta domestically and the premium cabins of Air France and Cathay Pacific.
She lives in New York City with her husband and two teenage children.
The cabin crew’s secret to avoiding jet lag.
I eat nothing on flights. I’ve talked to a lot of stewardesses about it, and it’s a stewardess secret. Ten years ago, it was [a cabin crew member] on Singapore Airlines on what was, at the time, the longest flight in the world (17 hours from Singapore to New York). She told me that her tried-and-true trick was not eating in-flight. Basically, at superhigh altitude, your digestive system shuts down completely. Someone said to me it’s like being under anesthesia. So when you get off the plane, everything restarts and [your digestive system] has so much more work to do and so it makes you more tired.
Most people overeat because it’s a diversion, or a way to pass the time; but even the best plane food is oversalted and preserved so it can be microwaved. So I have something to eat a couple hours before getting on the plane, but otherwise it’s nothing but lots and lots of water. Really and truly, I live by it and I feel so much better. I flew to Paris last week, for example, and I got off the plane at maybe 10 a.m., and when I landed I went for a fabulous lunch, which I didn’t feel guilty about in the slightest.
How to find a local recommendation in a city where you know no one.
To me, so much about travel is not about where you go but who you meet when you’re there. When you go to another city, you always want to have the name of somebody [to ask for recommendations]. A friend of mine told me one of his tips is always to go and seek out a restaurant with a communal table in any place he’s going where he doesn’t have the name of somebody to look up. It’s an instant way to interact with local people.
Travel insurance is vital—but so is stomach insurance.