
Where to Spend New Year, and What Closes First
New Year is one evening that the rest of a trip is built around, and the places that do it best are decided long before December. Here is what closes when — and what, for this year, is already closed.
Straight answers from advisors who design private travel for families who travel privately — when to go, where, and what only forty years of relationships can open.
In season now — the great migration, the harvest & autumn access






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New Year is one evening that the rest of a trip is built around, and the places that do it best are decided long before December. Here is what closes when — and what, for this year, is already closed.

Ask which luxury travel agency is best and the honest answer is a question back: best at what? A safari and an Italian honeymoon are judged on entirely different things.

The safari most people picture is a vehicle on open grassland. The other one is on foot, uphill, in cloud forest — and it is the one guests describe for years afterwards.

Short enough to be spontaneous, on the one island where a twenty-minute drive changes the country, the language and the menu. The French side to sleep, the Dutch side for the evening that runs late. A private, tailored journey of 5 Days · 4 Nights in St Martin, The Caribbean, designed end to end by a Forest Travel advisor — with Virtuoso privileges at the finest luxury hotels, from US$4,200 per traveler.

The island as a base rather than a destination: a crewed day to Anguilla's beaches, another to the uninhabited cays offshore, and a lagoon behind you that shelters more yachts than anywhere else in the region. A private, tailored journey of 8 Days · 7 Nights in St Martin, The Caribbean, designed end to end by a Forest Travel advisor — with Virtuoso privileges at the finest luxury hotels, from US$12,500 per traveler.

A staffed house above Baie Longue or Baie Rouge, where the beaches are long, undeveloped and almost entirely empty on a weekday — the quiet half of an island that also knows how to be loud. A private, tailored journey of 7 Days · 6 Nights in St Martin, The Caribbean, designed end to end by a Forest Travel advisor — with Virtuoso privileges at the finest luxury hotels, from US$12,500 per traveler.

The French side treated as what it is — the eating capital of this part of the Caribbean. A week of tables along Grand Case, a market morning in Marigot, and a chef who cooks in the villa on the night nobody wants to go out. A private, tailored journey of 6 Days · 5 Nights in St Martin, The Caribbean, designed end to end by a Forest Travel advisor — with Virtuoso privileges at the finest luxury hotels, from US$8,500 per traveler.

A house large enough for the whole party on the Platinum Coast, a chef briefed on the evening that matters, and a long table set where the sun goes down over the water rather than behind the island. A private, tailored journey of 8 Days · 7 Nights in Barbados, The Caribbean, designed end to end by a Forest Travel advisor — with Virtuoso privileges at the finest luxury hotels, from US$18,500 per traveler.

Two weeks on the west coast with the shallow, calm water that makes the difference with small children — a catamaran day down the leeward coast, and the turtles that gather off Paynes Bay most mornings. A private, tailored journey of 12 Days · 11 Nights in Barbados, The Caribbean, designed end to end by a Forest Travel advisor — with Virtuoso privileges at the finest luxury hotels, from US$18,500 per traveler.
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