We Asked Our Founders Where They’re Actually Traveling This Summer. Here’s the List.

Before Orli existed as a place guests could check into, it existed as a running list of notes, collateral, and photographs. These are the materials two people compile once years of hotel stays start to form a pattern, then a passion. We asked our founders to walk us through how they actually travel, and the answers ended up telling us as much about Orli as anything we could write ourselves.

 

What destination is at the top of your list this summer?

Jackson Hole at Caldera House, the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York, the Prospect in Hollywood, 1 Place Vendôme in Paris, Castle Hot Springs in Arizona, the Newman in London’s Fitzrovia, Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France. Between the two of us, the list runs long, and neither of us is inclined to shorten it.

 

Do you plan trips based on food, experience, or location?

Usually location first, then the food and experience get built around it. Unless a hotel is remarkable enough on its own terms, and then that becomes the destination.

 

Are you more of a plan-every-detail traveler or a figure-it-out-when-you-get-there type?

It depends entirely on who’s coming. Family trips get scheduled to the hour, free time included, with a printed itinerary waiting at the airport. Work travel goes the opposite direction, loose and spontaneous. Trips with friends land in the middle: dinners are booked ahead, everything else stays open.

 

What’s the one thing you always pack that most people forget?

Medicine, always, since there’s no telling what a new destination will throw at you. Vitamins and protein powder come next, some structure to hold onto while eating and drinking through a new place. One of us also throws in extra adapters, mostly because friends can be counted on to forget theirs.

 

Best meal you’ve ever had while traveling? Where was it and what made it stick?

A farm-to-table dinner in San Miguel de Allende, each course paired with a different tequila, introduced a wider range of Mexican cooking than expected, with predictable results by the end of the night. On the other side: a chef’s tagine at Palazzo Avino in Ravello, a tagine in a small town outside Fes, and a home-cooked Egyptian feast a guide’s wife prepared in Cairo.

 

What’s a place you keep going back to and why?

Eden Rock in St. Barths, for the setting and the island as much as the hotel. The Amalfi Coast, Positano to Capri to Ravello, is the other answer, a stretch that hasn’t gotten old yet.

 

What amenities do you look for at hotels when booking a stay?

A gym or a real wellness setup, sauna or cold plunge, and ideally a specialty coffee counter worth a stop on the way out the door.

 

What have been some of your most memorable experiences at a hotel?

A temazcal ceremony at Chablé Yucatán. A turtle conservation project in the Galápagos during hatching season. A full wellness day at Caldera House, massages and a sound bath and yoga worked in around everything else. A hotel-arranged our mom’s 65th birthday celebration, complete with a sunset cruise, local entertainment, and a chef’s dinner. And a private dinner in Amanzoe’s candlelit amphitheater, still the standard everything else gets measured against.

 

If you had a free weekend with no plans, where would you drive from La Jolla?

Los Angeles for family and good food, or Palm Springs for something slower, with a stop at Bar Cecil non-negotiable. The other vote goes across the border to Valle de Guadalupe.

 

What’s a trip that changed the way you think about hospitality?

A recent stay at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York felt like a return to an older idea of what a hotel could be, arriving through to a butler team on call for something as simple as a martini in the room. Time in Japan left a longer mark, the practice of omotenashi, hospitality built around anticipating what a guest needs before they ask. A trip to Cambodia at 24 did something similar, hospitality that showed up in the smallest exchanges, from a taxi driver to a tour guide.

 

Favorite hotel you’ve ever stayed in that isn’t Orli?

Too many variables to land on one. Caldera House, for a concierge team that treats the job like it matters. Aman Tokyo, AmanZoe, Amanbagh, Rosewood Mayakoba, Castiglione del Bosco. And the Belmond Orient Express, which isn’t technically a hotel but earns its place on the list anyway.

 

What destination or hotel is still on your bucket list, and what’s drawing you there?

Our Habitas AlUla, for a landscape hotel built into terrain unlike anything either of us has seen, distance being the only real obstacle. Casa Polanco in Mexico City, which is close to how we’d picture an Orli in that city. Passalacqua on Lake Como, always the stop that gets cut when a Europe trip runs short on time. A cruise to Antarctica, filed under things to do before it’s too late. And further out: Hong Kong, Singapore, Machu Picchu.