Insights on the future of travel from the visionary behind the membership-model luxury lifestyle concierge, Roman & Erica

In 2009, Erica Jackowitz and Roman Chiporukha cofounded Roman & Erica, a first-of-its-kind, high-touch luxury lifestyle concierge service. Through their expertise, organizational prowess and extensive network, Jackowitz and Chiporukha have worked to maximize the leisure time of their ultra-high-net-worth clients, and bring their dreams to life along the way. Their suite of capabilities ranges from securing impossible dinner reservations to planning remote travel—and they do so through a membership model that, for their clients, is like taking on an assistant dedicated to the leisure needs who works as an intricate part of their team. Jackowitz and Chiporukha are not a third party; they’re practically in-house.

As the acclaim of Roman & Erica has grown, Chiporukha has since co-founded SpaceVIP—a pioneering space-travel organization developing off-planet pursuits (including, right now, a Michelin-star chef’s dinner in a balloon at the edge of space). Chiporukha and Jackowitz also founded Rêve Travel Club, a travel-only spin-off of Roman & Erica. With this organization, Chiporukha and Jackowitz can reach more people by passing some of the logistical work to their team after leading creative with their clients for an initial quarter dedicated to experience ideation and planning. Rêve Travel Club has become an immediate success and channels the profound capabilities of Chiporukha, Jackowitz and their growing team.

To learn more about Rêve Travel Club, we sat down for a spirited, insightful conversation with Jackowitz.

In conversing with you, it’s easy to understand your level of expertise in the travel and lifestyle sectors. What is this expertise the result of?

Firstly, and most importantly, we actually live the lifestyle, and experience all that we curate for our clients. It all comes from first-hand knowledge, which allows our clients to trust us implicitly. We personally travel for about six months out of the year uncovering the hidden gems while also putting on our party shoes and dancing—loudly—at the world’s best spots and doing everything in between. To this end, I often find myself in conversations with potential new members who are unhappy with their current lifestyle and/or travel solutions and ask them: have you ever met the people planning these moments for you? Have you wanted to go grab a drink or dinner with them and hang out? Almost 90% of the time the answer is “no.”  They’ve been working together for 10+ years and have never met. What a funny thing that is. The person you entrust with your most valuable asset—your time—should be someone who uniquely understands you.

How do you maintain this enthusiasm for travel that’s very evident when meeting you?

Experience is something I am in constant search of. It is an absolutely unquenchable thirst for me. I am quite taken by the once-in-a-lifetime experiences, but perhaps, more importantly, I am continuously mesmerized by the beauty of life’s simplest moments. For example, the way a magnificent sunrise or sunset captivates and makes the whole world stop and look. Taking a bike ride through a city so you can feel the city, elicits all of the five senses rather than seeing it through a car window. Timing things the right way so you are the only one there, making it feel like the world is yours and yours alone. My enthusiasm comes from my own zest for life and life experiences. For me, no day is ever the same.

You invented the lifestyle management model with your company Roman & Erica. Can you talk about this model—what it allows you to provide, and how you’re able to provide it?

With Roman & Erica, we created the lifestyle management model almost 15 years ago. We are the first ever “Lifestylists.” We looked at many of the models out there back in 2009 and they had either a mass market concierge appeal and/or were replete with undisclosed hidden costs and heavy percentages added on top of any and all services. All of this didn’t make sense to us. 

First, how could you have a super-exclusive service and secure a dinner reservation at the latest hotspot if you’re charging annually what is essentially the cost of a luxury handbag? That means there must be dozens of calls per day from that company for that 7:30/8PM spot and not only do the hosts get annoyed but who gets precedence? There are a lot of people that can afford a service like that, so obviously the service has to be diluted and the client is not getting that reservation anytime soon unless a 5PM or 11PM reservation time sounds like a win to you? 

Next is transparency. Wealthy people have made their money for a reason. To not respect that and charge 20-30% on top of things like a last-minute car service reservation because they think no one’s watching is just stupid. We go for loyalty all day every day and, while I am sure we could have racked in a lot more money over the years had we followed the lead of many others before and after us, transparency is far more important to us and builds a kind of trust with our clients that keeps them coming back year after year.  

With these things in mind, we scaled back the number of clients we would manage and raised our costs charging an annual “salary” for our services that is commensurate with the level of dedication required. Growth has been organic and by word of mouth for the better part of the last decade, allowing us to control our numbers, and staff our team, accordingly—ensuring that they are appropriately trained in our way of doing things prior to taking on their first client. We charge more than anyone else because we dedicate more time than anyone else, have the best interests of the client in mind always, and have no other financial motivation.

With Rêve Travel Club, you’re further expanding access to your capabilities. Can you share a little bit about this model and what you hope to achieve here?

Well, the Roman & Erica lifestyle membership is a very limited model and we can only service about 30 or so families at a time. As we very rarely have a breakup, we are quite limited as to the number of new members we can service since Roman or I serve as their direct account manager available to them 24/7. We also like it that way, to be honest. When it comes to their leisure, we are their first call and we become a necessary part of their lifestyle and, at the end of most days, actual friends! On average, most of our clients have been with us for 10+ years. 

Over the years, we have been approached considerably for one-off travel needs by family and friends in our network as a result of our reputation in the industry. No model out there really inspired me as to how I could service the needs of those who were looking for a solution for only their travels versus their lifestyle as a whole. That was until the idea of Rêve Travel Club came to me about a year-and-a-half ago. Most importantly, I didn’t need to look to anyone else’s model for inspiration, I only needed to look at my own! 

Can you imagine that people have consultants they pay to give them advice in every single facet of their lives, from lawyers to accountants to interior designers, party planners, money managers, etc?  Yet literally the one thing in their lives that they work toward—their leisure time with their family and friends—they leave in the hands of a person on the other side of the 1 800 number they call on the back of their credit card or to a travel agent they don’t actually pay seriously? Then they proceed with expectations that everything they desire will be all set because the person they booked through gets paid by the hotel? To be clear, that person gets paid 5-10% from the hotel which is a joke considering the amount of time it takes them to get a spa reservation confirmed! Do you really think they have the time with this sort of model to dedicate to you given the number of people they must service just to make a living? It’s an absurd model. 

Those that are happy with these free services, diluted with so many members that the consultant has to prioritize quantity over quality work, should stick with it. For those who actually want to be able to simply show up to their travels with every detail planned and considered, every desire acknowledge and anticipated, confirmed and reconfirmed so that all you have to do is enjoy—then for the first time ever, Rêve Travel Club offers clients a solution. Moreover, that solution comes at a cost that can be less than what a weekly housekeeper costs. What could possibly be more worthwhile than not having to think while on vacation and take an actual break from it all?

Based on your observations, what are luxury travelers looking for in 2024 that they weren’t looking for before?

Availability! Wealth is at an all time high and, in a post 2020 Covid world, advanced planning is something that is here to stay. I talk about this often but what happened to travel in 2020 was that those that had bookings for 2020 were rescheduled to 2021. In 2021 people went to book for the current year and were sold out of dates and/or accommodations they wanted. Then in 2022 those people planned way in advance so that others were sold out. Thus a pattern of advanced planning began and I believe it is here to stay. 

A result of all of this advanced planning is that luxury travelers who once booked things on a whim with under two weeks’ notice are now often not able to get what they wanted. It’s about finding creative solutions that surpass what the client may have thought they wanted. That’s part of the fun!

Is there something that travelers aren’t looking for that they should be?

Enriching and unique experiences even in destinations that they often frequent! I am a big believer that, while you could go to the ends of the earth and beyond—see Space VIP—you can also do things in your travels to places you frequent in order to make them more exciting and something out of the ordinary. Just please don’t be boring. If you are going to St Tropez, try jet skiing in the canals of Port Grimaud. Go beyond the party in St Barth’s and hike in the mornings. Take a vintage Segway tour of Rome at night when it’s lit only by city lights! Climb a Via Ferrata one morning in Lake Como! Be weird, be different, and most of all, have an experience in time and place that will remain with you, always. A view from the top in and of itself is not by itself enough!

What are you providing that people can’t get elsewhere?

An unfiltered realness that uniquely syncs with their desires. Everything we do has a real feel because we have really felt it!  We only recommend the things we ourselves experience and do not recommend those that we didn’t enjoy and are just as vocal about them. We enable them to just show up to their travels and lifestyles, which is something that doesn’t exist elsewhere. 

When a client comes to you and says, “this is my dream,” how do you start to turn that into a reality? How collaborative is it, or do most clients put it in your hands?

Rêve actually means to “dream” in French so this question is quite apropos! How we make these dreams a reality really depends on the client! Some want to be involved in the process and some do not. No matter where they fall along that spectrum, our client intake and subsequent conversations help us get at what they are looking for and curate experiences accordingly. The questions I ask may sound simple but have been developed so strategically that they allow for maximum insight into who the client is and what they truly seek—even if they don’t yet know that themselves. We are in the business of delivering things on a silver platter. For some, they wish for that platter to be one of curated choices and for others, it is one that is more of a final itinerary that shocks and surprises.