Celestielle

Celestielle is a New Zealand-based travel house whose clients live in more than thirty countries, a majority of them in the United States. It plans highly personalized journeys, from straightforward holidays to complex, multi-country itineraries, and works from a simple preference: to recommend only places it knows personally. Doug Easton and John Ziegler have each traveled to more than two hundred countries and territories, and for many years have spent much of the year visiting hotels, lodges, camps and destinations rather than reading about them. Virtually everything the house recommends is informed by first-hand experience — the difference between a property that looks good in photographs and one worth suggesting to a particular client.

Those travels have also produced long-standing relationships with hotel owners, general managers, guides and local operators around the world. The house values them less for arranging reservations than for understanding how a place works, and, where appropriate, for making arrangements beyond what is available through standard booking channels.

Its team of travel professionals is based across New Zealand, the Americas and South Africa, which allows the house to support clients across time zones and throughout their journeys. Each trip is planned individually around the people traveling; there is no catalog of pre-designed itineraries. Through its trust, a registered New Zealand charity, the house also sponsors student travel overseas. Celestielle continues to travel, revisit places it knows and record many of them in its own short films — a working record of where it has been, and of what it believes is worth sharing with its clients.