If you’re paying more than $4,000 a night at a Greek resort, you might feel entitled some basic creature comforts. But at Sani, an ultra-luxe five-hotel complex on Greece’s Kassandra Peninsula, some well-heeled guests are choosing to forage for their food, find shelter in a cave and build fires by rubbing sticks together. It’s a paradox of our times, one well suited for a White Lotus subplot: the world’s wealthiest travelers are among those most avidly preparing to survive the apocalypse.
To be fair, Sani also boasts all the usual trappings high-end travelers have come to expect, including suites with gardens and private pools, and spas with an extensive menu of massages, facials, wraps and beach therapies. But today’s one-percenter vacationers have come to expect more than just pristine beaches and high thread counts. Experiences are the ultimate luxury, and Sani offers them in spades thanks to an impressive slate of celebrity collaborations. Among them are tennis classes taught by Rafael Nadal, a soccer program for kids run by Britain’s Chelsea Football Club, and Sani Gourmet, a gastronomy series that this year drew Michelin-starred chefs led by Daniel Boulud. (“I was impressed that the culinary team at Sani was able to source all the exotic ingredients that the chefs requested,” said Boulud.)
Perhaps the most surprising of these offerings, considering the cushiness of the surroundings, are the daily courses in primitive wilderness endurance, led by bushwhacking reality TV stalwart Bear Grylls’ Survival Academy.
“There is a new clientele to the outdoor industry; it ramped up during COVID, and our call outs tripled,’’ said Anna Humphries, development and logistics manager for the academy, and one of the program’s trainers.
Humphries says the pandemic led many wealthy people to contemplate doomsday scenarios and attempt to prep for them by attempting feats of endurance and deprivation. They often discovered how ill-suited they were to adventure.
“A lot of people don’t know what they are doing, so mountain rescues also tripled and were higher than they had ever been before,’’ reported Humphries. “People were genuinely trying to do things they had never done.’’
At Sani, the guests who take these classes are sometimes like fish out of water. “We have had people show up in Gucci shoes with nice jeans and a jacket,’’ sighed Humphries. “It’s always quite entertaining, but some of these guests just don’t have scruffy clothes.’’
Sani has tapped into something most high-end resorts don’t provide: an offering for successful people who feel increasingly dependent on technology and out of touch with nature, incapable of basic self-sufficiency. Humphries was alarmed to find how many people that describes.
“If I walked out of my house tomorrow and randomly talked to people, I don’t think I could find one who knew survival skills,’’ she said. “People go out on hikes using Google Maps. What would happen if their phones died? Parents say they don’t know what they would do if they took their kids on a hike and got lost, and they are afraid that they, and their children, can’t do anything without tech. We support and teach these people what to do.’’
Bear Grylls, who has visited Sani personally, is finding a new clientele among the one percent worldwide, including families who fly from sunny South Africa on private jets to an ice strip landing in Antarctica, eager to learn how to survive in the harshest environment on the planet, with its ice caves, glaciers and blizzards. It turns out that Sani’s property, surrounded by three acres of private forest, wetlands and seven beaches, with 200 types of rare and endangered birds, an ecological reserve, pine forests and lakes, as well as beaches, is a more welcoming, but no less worthy training ground.
Said chef Boulud: “Maybe at the next Sani Gourmet in 2026, Bear Grylls can show us how to forage for our own exotic ingredients!’’
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