My bizarre life getting billionaires what they want

Times

5 days ago

Olivia Ferney had a problem.
She was looking after a multimillionaire Miami businessman in his forties, who was sailing on a yacht around Greece in the Aegean. Yet however lovely that might sound, the man was not content. The yacht was nowhere near the isle of Mykonos, where he had just heard about a 'sick' party he 'had to attend'.
'He really, really desperately wanted to go to this party,' Ferney, a marketing director and travel specialist with Top Tier Travel, said. 'It was literally do or die. He was, like, 'I need to go right now. If you don't get this for me, screw you, screw your business. I'm going to take you guys down'.'
Instead of hanging up, firing him as a client or simply saying 'no can do', Ferney soothed him and sprung into action.
She knew some friends on a nearby yacht with a helipad. She chartered a smaller boat to take her client to that yacht while arranging for a helicopter to whisk him off to Mykonos. The total cost to get to a 'sick' party on time? $100,000.
Welcome to the travels of the rich and highly demanding.
For Ferney, who is unnaturally calm in the face of chaos, nearly no client demand is too crazy.
In the past month the 24-year-old Canadian has become a social media star, posting videos that show how she deals with the most challenging rich people in the world, under the Instagram handle @travelwithlivii. The videos almost always present Ferney sitting in a car, at a hotel, or on the go, answering calls from clients. No matter how odd or outrageous their requests, she immediately assuages their concerns.
While most of the calls she videos are re-enacted with the permission of her clients, some of her clients agree to re-enact the calls themselves. 'Some clients have zero problems with me sharing stuff,' Ferney said. 'They're great. For most of them, I just change their name. And they have a blast with it, so it's really, really fun.'
Ferney says the richer people are, the easier they are to handle. 'A lot of clients in the multimillionaire status tend to be tougher than the billionaire clients,' she says. 'They're more particular — I always found that very, very interesting.'
She speculates there must be a 'sweet point' where you 'just have to become a nice person because everybody you're hanging out with has so much money. You can't buy friends. So you just become a super nice person.'
Ferney, who launched her social media account five months ago, tells me the videos 'kind of took off' and her audience now reaches 400,000 followers across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.
It's easy to get sucked into the account, which features demands so cartoonish they seem too satirical to be believed. Take the woman who refused to drink her margarita until she knew exactly where the limes came from.
The conversation went like this:
Client: 'I'm OK but I'm not great … I'm allergic to certain limes from certain countries … because of the pollination … I don't have signs like my face doesn't swell up, but I know intuitively my body is rejecting it.'
Olivia: 'I will get in touch with provisions and find out where they source their limes from.'
Other videos are titled: 'Dad sending daughter on a $200,000 vacation after getting engaged for a third time'; 'Client demands $10,000 upgrade to escape children … worth it? [yes]'; 'Client won't wash her hair until someone hand delivers imported spring water'.
And so on. 'Honestly, those stories are 10 per cent of what I deal with,' Ferney says with a laugh.
But is she not risking her business by disclosing the private demands of her clients? Are future clients, who prize their privacy, not put off her social media presence? And who the hell would agree to be recorded complaining about the size of a hotel's ice cube?
Ferney says her clients 'don't find that stuff embarrassing. These are very common conversations for a lot of these people, and when you're able to have everything in the world all the time, whenever you want it, however you want it, there's never enough.
'So when they're in their circles, getting the right pink G Wagon for their two-year-old daughter's birthday, getting the right Birkin bag tomorrow in Capri, getting the jet that's the right colour. Like, those things really matter to these people. And it's my job to validate them and just make it happen.'
But confusing situations can arise from Ferney's video recreations. For example, one client saw a video that sounded like a vacation she had taken — and assumed Ferney was making fun of her.
'She was like, 'What the f***? I took this exact trip, or I'm taking it in two weeks. Like, is this story based off me?' And I felt so bad because a lot of these people are taking the exact same trips. It was totally not based on her.'
Raised in Dundas, Ontario, a farming town with a population of 20,000, Ferney grew up in a middle-class family that 'still can't believe the stories I tell them when I go home'. In college she majored in marketing and organisational behaviour — while running a social media marketing company on the side — until she met Troy Arnold, the Top Tier Travel founder, during a trip to Miami.
One year ago, Ferney moved to Miami and joined Arnold's company, where clients pay $2,500 to $8,500 a month for concierge services. Ferney claims she works seven days a week and is home only one month of the year.
She is mostly on the road, 'in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Dubai and Europe … usually checking out all of the five-star hotels around the globe to make sure that everything is up to par, like a secret shopper'.
She needs to make sure every space her clients enter is free from 'any weird noises. There's no weird smells. The staff are all treating people correctly'.
In her time with Top Tier Travel, Ferney said she had arranged for a $200,000 yacht to sit outside a Caribbean villa in case a client wanted a change of scenery. 'It simply sat there docked outside the house for the whole trip.' She has arranged custom room services and menus for clients' dogs. And she has flown a lavender spray from London to France for a client who refused to sleep anywhere without it.
• Walkies at 30,000ft: my flight on the luxury airline for dogs
But she puts her foot down when it comes to one request: 'Many people want me to be a matchmaker for them, and I make my line very clear … I would never.'
In a summer when every billionaire is flaunting their wealth and access across Europe, sometimes even Ferney cannot pull an elephant out of a hat. Especially when all these people want the same reservation at the same restaurant at the same time.
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'One per cent of the time, there is not a bribe in the world that can make that happen,' Ferney says. 'Especially when it's all billionaires competing against billionaires. At some point, a $20,000 bribe doesn't do shit.'
Paula Froelich is the senior story editor and on-air contributor for NewsNation. You can follow her own travels with the rich and famous on Instagram at @pfro.