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___Holiday rental properties serve as the perfect answer for vacationers looking for privacy and exclusivity in the lap of luxury. The best private villas and chalets come fully staffed, with concierge services available to carry out the guest’s every desire. “This kind of experience is completely different because you are at your private villa, your private home, while having the same services as in a world-class hotel or even better. Simply because you are the only guest”, explains Paolo Macchiaroli, the CEO and founder of My Private Villas, an exclusive club of proprietors offering their luxurious villas directly to global clients.
Having over a decade of experience in providing affluent holiday rentals, Paolo is one of the leading exclusive holiday entrepreneurs who specialises in upscale, extravagant properties such as private villas, chalets and private islands around the world. He created My Private Villas as an alternative to many other villa rental agencies. Paolo remarks that the villa rental market has changed significantly over the past few years as an incredible number of new agencies appeared on the internet, which created a huge confusion on the market. Paolo has witnessed the same villas being advertised on different websites under different names and different rates. “What I’ve have learnt in my 10 years’ experience is that the only way to survive in the jungle of millions of rental agencies is to work in total transparency. Many villa rental agencies are focused on making as much profit as possible from one single booking. We are focused on creating the perfect conditions instead, by simply offering extra visibility to the villas and promoting them at the real best price to get a lot of bookings. We invest a lot of energy in creating tailor-made marketing and promotional activities for our villas with our PR agencies in London, Paris & Monaco and Latin America”, says Paolo. Each month a splendid new villa appears on My Private Villas’ website in the category “The villa of the month”. Mr. Macchiaroli explains the importance of such listings: “The villa of the month is a villa that we like to push more via our website. It may be a new villa that we have recently added to our extensive catalogue, for example; the best villa in Bora Bora, which we want to give the maximum visibility to on our website. Or, simply there might be a special promotion on one of our voluptuous villas and we encourage our clients to take advantage of it”. Meetings and events for the press are frequently organised in order to give the clients an opportunity to find out more about the luxurious properties. “We organise FAM trips (“Fam Trip” is a short name for “Familiarisation Trip”) for the press and for our partners. A month ago I was in the Italian Dolomites with three top managers of one of the most important private jet brokers worldwide. We did not just host them in a luxury chalet but we tailored some unique experiences in the property and the feedback was…’WOW!’ In September we will arrange a FAM trip for the Mexican press and we will host them for 6 nights in our top villas in Tuscany, Venice and Como Lake, where they will be able to experience wine tasting, a private fashion show, exquisite dining with Michelin star chefs and much more. We have also recently organised a wine tasting event for 70 people in a prestigious hotel facing Hyde Park to offer our clients a chance of experiencing some of the best Tuscan wine. The villa which produced that wine was of course presented at the wine tasting. Next month we are hosting a dinner in the restaurant of Alain Ducasse to let the clients enjoy several dishes all based on fresh truffles; of which those with a sense of adventure can go hunting for and have them served for dinner in some of our Italian villas. We believe that the most important thing is not just presenting a villa or a chalet, but letting the client have an unforgettable experience”.
Talking about the criteria which defines a villa as being in the top-scale bracket, Paolo focuses on the location of the villa and the services offered. In Paolo’s experience, the most popular destinations for private villa hire in Europe are Tuscany, Como Lake and the Amalfi Coast in Italy; St Tropez, Cannes and Provence in France; the Balearic islands and Marbella in Spain; Mykonos and Santorini in Greece and of course the famous ski resorts in the Alps such as Courchevel, St Moritz, Gstaad and Verbier. The more exotic destinations include St. Barth in the Caribbean, Koh Samui and Phuket in Thailand, Bali in Indonesia and multiple locations in South Africa and Brazil. “We can find the best villa in the world, but of course if it’s in the middle of nowhere, there is no way to promote it efficiently, so we always need glamorous and highly desirable destinations”, says Paolo. However, finding the best location is not everything. Having over 300 luscious properties around the globe, Paolo and his team annually visit all of the villas to ensure the quality standards of the services are supreme. “We always have to guarantee the highest quality of the villa as our clients always expect to be in an immaculate property. Services and staff are probably the most important and difficult criteria. If a client chooses a fantastic villa in a fabulous location but the service is not like you would find in a 5* hotel, the client won’t be satisfied. We have to be sure that the services provided by the chef, the butler, the housekeeper and all the other staff are impeccable. High net worth individuals have been everywhere in the world and have been to all of the famous 5* hotels, so we need to guarantee that all our properties are able to satisfy them in the most professional way”.
For more information about luxury villa rentals, visit www.myprivatevillas.com
