From ski racer to architect of ultra-luxury travel, Bella Syme – founder of ALS Private – now designs journeys for the world’s most private elite. Here, she reveals how she built a word-of-mouth empire and what true luxury looks like at the highest level. Jenny Southan reports

When did your relationship with skiing begin?

I grew up skiing from the age of four. We went every year as a family and I just fell in love with it. My sister started at the same time; she enjoyed our holidays and can ski well, but she didn’t go on to build a career around it. I think I was simply wired for it.

Skiing is also in my genetics – my grandmother and her two sisters were professional ski racers for Great Britain. They were presidents of the Ski Club of Great Britain, the Kandahar and the DHO, all the old-school racing clubs.

I learnt to ski in Courchevel and we skied the Trois Vallées for many years. I raced through school, competing in alpine racing, then specialised in giant slalom and slalom – slalom ended up being my strongest discipline. I did a bit of super-G and downhill too, but not much. After school I moved to the Alps to race full-time.

At what point did you decide to change direction?

When you’re racing you eventually have to decide which route you’re going to take. Skiing isn’t football – if you’re not right at the top, there isn’t really a middle ground. I decided to do all my exams and qualify as an instructor as well. That’s when I discovered off-piste and freeride skiing. I moved from being a piste racer to a freeride skier, which is almost a different sport.

Racing is very regimented – strict training programmes, curfews, what you eat and drink, everything. Freeride is far more relaxed and, when I was doing it, there weren’t serious training structures or big budgets behind it. I competed and coached in freeride, and that’s what took me to Verbier, where I lived for ten years. I still ski a few months a year, but I’m based in the UK now.

You’ve spent a lot of time in high-risk mountain environments. How has that shaped you?

In the freeride community you do sadly lose friends – to avalanches, serious accidents, life-changing injuries. I was only in my mid-twenties but I’d already seen a lot and it made me stop and think, “What kind of life do I want?” One of the reasons I stepped away from full-time freeride was that calculation: do I want to live hard and fast, or build something more sustainable?

At the same time, I realised that all I really knew was skiing and snow. I wanted to stay in the industry and do something I loved, so I started to carve out a different path.

Is that what led you into ultra-luxury travel design?

Exactly. I began by booking luxury chalets for friends and clients I’d met along the way. It grew organically through word of mouth. I formally founded ALS Private in 2013 when I was 25 – so we’re now 12 years in.

We operate at the very top end of the market – the top fraction of a percent. It’s not a volume business; we don’t churn out bookings. Each trip is highly bespoke.

How did you tap into that ultra high net worth segment?

Entirely through word of mouth and my specialist knowledge of skiing, snow and the Alps. People would say, “Speak to Bella, she knows”. I did one great trip for someone and then got referred to a celebrity, who then told someone else. That’s how it began, with a strong focus on celebrity clients. These days we almost shy away from that sector a little; we don’t say no, but celebrities are a very specific type of client and they don’t necessarily have the same budgets as self-made billionaires.

Most of our core clients now are billionaire-level. They’re a very different profile – quieter, more private, and often far larger spenders.

Where are your clients based?

Very globally spread. We have wonderful clients from Scandinavia, the US, India, the UK and increasingly South America. We’ve had Asian and Middle Eastern clients too. We’re not focused on one region; it’s a genuinely diverse client base.

Can you give a sense of what they might spend on a trip?

We don’t publish detailed figures, but it’s fair to say that a typical trip often runs into the hundreds of thousands. For many people, it would be more than their total annual travel spend, sometimes by orders of magnitude.

Are you still primarily a ski specialist?

Ski is still the core of the business and always will be, but we’re now global. Until about five years ago we were purely ski. Today we cover sun and city, too, but always with a strong property focus. On the snow side, we do classic Alpine trips and also winter destinations like Lapland or polar regions where the emphasis might be more on the snowy environment than on skiing itself – think heli-adventures, expeditions or “once in a lifetime” experiences in extreme locations.

On the sun side, we work with exceptional private villas and estates: the South of France, Italy – Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast – Greek islands, the Caribbean, Palm Beach… We’re not a typical itinerary-based travel agency bouncing clients between big hotel brands. It’s usually private homes, buyouts and highly curated experiences wrapped around those stays.

What would you say is ALS Private’s USP?

There are two big things. First, access. We specialise in what I call “the impossible properties” – private homes and estates that are not officially on the rental market and often never have been. Other agents and concierge companies who can’t fulfil a request themselves will come to us on a white-label basis. Palm Beach is a good recent example: a friend’s family had a spectacular house for sale, fully furnished, never rented. We did a one-off arrangement with them for a trusted client.

Second, obsessive attention to detail. I’m a perfectionist and I encourage my team to be the same. We don’t just ask for dietary requirements and call it a day. We know our clients’ preferred bed linen thread count, their favourite water and the temperature it should be by the bed, how warm they like each bedroom, their children’s current obsessions so we can theme a birthday party around Paw Patrol if that’s what will make them light up. We hold an incredibly detailed profile on every client and use it to add layers of thoughtful, often unspoken touches – the things money can’t easily buy.

We’re a core team of eight in the office, then we scale up with freelance and on-the-ground staff for big projects. On one Caribbean project, for example, we flew in around 100 people – a mix of the client’s own staff, my team and extended crew.

Did you grow up in the world you now curate for your clients?

Not at all. I didn’t grow up on private islands or in super-yachts. My entry point was skiing as a profession. It’s perceived as an elitist sport and that certainly opened some doors, but the real education has come from the work itself.

Over the past decade I’ve stayed in many of the places we book – sometimes for weeks at a time, living alongside clients to make sure everything runs seamlessly. I’ve spent eight to ten weeks on Necker Island over the last three years, for example. I know it inside out. I’ve stayed in or inspected the top chalets across the Alps, and we work with extraordinary properties – ranches, glass-walled houses in Aspen, private islands, serious yachts. Often the owners are celebrities or ultra high net worth individuals who are now on the other side of the equation, renting out their second or third homes.

When do you personally go on site with clients?

For standard trips we manage everything remotely and the client travels without us. For very high-spec projects – the ones that become large-scale events – we’re there on the ground.

New Year’s Eve on Necker Island is a good example (read Globetrender's review of Necker here). Our client flies in around 200 guests; it’s a huge production. We’ve organised it for two years running. The first year we did a drone show and separate fireworks display; the second year we combined them, with fireworks launching off the drones. That level of detail and co-ordination really requires us to be there.

Discretion seems critical in your world. Your website is very understated.

Discretion is everything. All of our clients come via word of mouth. We don’t get business from Google search, and we don’t expect to. The website is there for validation once someone has been referred – people like to check you out online – but it’s deliberately opaque.

For prospective clients who are already in conversation with us, we have a private library of short films and reels that showcase the kinds of events and trips we’ve done, always without identifiable faces. Our clients appreciate that their lives are not splashed across the internet. It doesn’t help us with mass marketing, but it’s exactly what our niche wants.

What kinds of experiences are your clients asking for now compared to when you started?

The baseline has shifted dramatically. When I started, the brief for a luxury ski holiday was: “We want a beautiful chalet, ski-in/ski-out if possible, fully catered.” We’d book their instructors and restaurant lunches and they’d ski all day.

Now, certain features – like having a pool – are assumed. No one even mentions it; it’s a prerequisite. The activities have gone from straightforward skiing plus lunch to intensely curated days: husky sledding in the morning, private shopping experiences, Moncler popping up in the chalet so they can shop in privacy rather than being snapped in the village.

The biggest change is that most of our clients feel they’ve “done it all”. They’ve ticked every classic box – the famous islands, the iconic lodges, the usual heli-skiing, the safari circuits. Our job is to show them that they absolutely haven’t done it all and then take them to the next level.

That might mean chartering an ice-breaker yacht rather than another conventional super-yacht; heading deep into the Canadian Arctic to picnic at a hand-carved ice table on an uninhabited island; or working with partners like Eleven Experience to layer additional surprises – a favourite band helicoptered to a mountain for a private concert, or a Michelin-level chef cooking in a totally unexpected location.

You mentioned explorer yachts. Is that a big focus for the future?

Definitely. Explorer yachts and ice-breakers are one of the most exciting areas right now. The interiors are as beautiful as any classic super-yacht, but the hulls allow you to access regions other vessels can’t reach. At the Monaco Yacht Show, 90% of the harbour was traditional super-yachts that essentially shuttle between the Med and the Caribbean. Only a small section – the “adventure area” – was dedicated to explorer yachts. To me, that’s where the real potential lies.

We’re working increasingly with yards like Damen Yachting and tracking new launches such as Solace, which I’m very excited about. Combining that kind of hardware with our style of experience design is a natural next step.

What are your ambitions for the next decade?

To deepen what we’re already doing, especially at sea, and to be more widely recognised within the industry for the level at which we operate – without compromising the discretion our clients value. I’d like ALS Private to be known not just for securing impossible properties, but for orchestrating entire journeys and events around them.

Finally, what keeps you motivated after so many years at the very top end of travel?

I’m genuinely obsessed with this world. The people are fascinating, the logistics are complex, and no two projects are the same. I love understanding what makes each client tick and then creating something that feels utterly unique and, ideally, unforgettable. As long as there are new places to discover and new ideas to bring to life, I don’t see that changing.