What a Storm on the Adriatic Taught Me About Luxury
On our first night aboard, my husband, Joe, was braced in the doorway of our cabin while the yacht pitched up and down beneath him. Over the wind, he yelled, “Is God messing with me?”
It was a fair question. We had spent months planning that trip, and the plan didn’t make it through the first night.
The plan
It was 2022, and I was hosting my agency’s first group trip to Croatia: six couples, Joe and me included, on a private yacht charter along the Adriatic coast. My team and I had worked on the itinerary for months. We’d mapped the classic route, north from Dubrovnik to Split, and thought through every stop and every dinner along the way.
I plan luxury trips for a living, and this one had my name on it. Everything on board was built around our group, and I wanted it to feel special from the first hour.
Then the storm came in.
“Can I take over?”
The rain turned cold. The wind kept building. The boat rocked all night, and nobody was having a good time, me included.
The weather wasn’t the hardest part for me, though. The hardest part was that five other couples had trusted me with their vacation, and they were looking at me for answers. I didn’t have any.
That’s when our captain came to Joe and me with a question: “Can I take over?”
He didn’t just mean steering around the weather. He wanted to run the rest of the trip. Instead of heading up the coast as planned, he’d take us west, out among smaller islands and villages that he knew and we didn’t.
For someone in my job, that is not an easy yes. Planning is what my clients count on me for. Handing the whole itinerary to someone I’d just met, on a boat, with a group relying on me, went against every professional instinct I had.
We said yes anyway. Actually, we said, “Yes, please.”
Off the usual route
Croatia has more than a thousand islands, and most itineraries, mine included, stick to the same handful of famous stops. Our captain took us to places I never would have put on a plan.
We stopped in small villages. We found a bar with exactly twelve seats, one for each of us. We drank very good local wine and met people we never would have met on the main route. After that first night, the trip was fantastic.
Dinner, caught off the stern
The moment everyone still brings up is the calamari.
One evening, as we were heading into town, our chef was standing off the back of the yacht holding a spear. None of us knew what he was doing. We smiled, shrugged, and walked off to explore.
When we came back aboard, he had a plate of fresh calamari waiting for us. He’d caught it off the back of the boat while we were gone.
I’ve eaten at plenty of beautiful restaurants on the job. Very few of those meals have stuck with me the way that plate did.
What luxury turned out to be
Here’s what surprised me most: most of our guests never knew the plan had changed. To them, this was simply the trip. Behind the scenes, the captain and I were working it out together, and my stress level stayed high for a while.
But twelve people who barely knew each other at the start of that week were genuinely close by the end. A lot of that came from moments nobody had written into an itinerary.
I went into that trip thinking luxury was a flawless plan, executed perfectly. I came out of it thinking luxury is being in the hands of people who know a place so well they can give you a better version of it than the one you asked for.
A crew that knows which islands to run to when the weather turns. A chef who fishes for your dinner. A village bar with twelve seats.
It also came down to trust. We trusted a good partner: the company that owned the yacht, and the captain and crew they put on board. And we trusted our own gut that it was okay to throw out a plan we’d spent months building.
There’s an old saying I love: luck favors the prepared mind. I used to think being prepared meant having every minute mapped out. Now I think it also means being ready to listen when someone who knows the water better than you asks, “Can I take over?”
Why I still tell this story
We liked that trip so much that we ran it again two years later, the same way, and worked some of those small stops into the plan on purpose. On the second trip, we told the new group about the first night of the first cruise: the rocking cabins, the cold rain, Joe in the doorway. It always gets a smile.
It’s also the trip I think about when a client tells me they want every minute of their vacation locked down. I understand that completely. When you’ve saved for a trip, certainty feels good. But Mother Nature gets a vote, so our team builds backup plans for the day she decides to use it.
Just about every good memory I have from that week traces back to the storm that wrecked our route.
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Kristin Freeman is the Founder & CEO of FlyOver Travel, an award-winning luxury travel agency based in Kansas City. A luxury travel expert and industry insider, she leads a team of advisors specializing in tailor-made journeys, luxury resorts, cruises, destination weddings, and immersive escapes. A consistent Top-25 producer among more than 12,000 advisors, Kristin brings a decade of industry experience and a firsthand understanding of what today’s luxury travelers value most.
