Bubbles spit and sizzle over a cream-brown leather armchair, catching the golden lowlight of the cabin. A Singapore Airlines stewardess, liveried in haute couture, pours from a bottle of Dom Perignon into an outstretched champagne flute. On a flight between Barcelona and Sao Paulo, Jarvis Marcos and his father consume caviar and melt into downy cushions and double bed linens in an eight-seat private cabin, switching between the window seats for a swirling orange-red sunset and the inside seats for a soft snooze the remainder of the way. Fast forward 12 hours and the passing clouds are traded in for the chockablock luminous turrets of Sao Paulo’s cityscape back on land. The surprise 70^th birthday celebration, courtesy of 55,000 air miles for £550, ends in a return of Krug, convenience, and more caviar, just one of the crazy and convoluted first-class trips Jarvis Marcos has snapped up with some of the world’s best luxury airlines, and the type of trips you’ll find on his blog, The Luxury Traveller. which helps you understand how to travel with air miles and ply loyalty programmes to relish the best life can offer for very little money.

In the luxury space since 2013, Jarvis’ blog and Instagram takes no-nonsense, unbiased reviews of the best luxury airlines and luxury hotels and resorts, and combines them with tried-and-tested pointers on how to ‘add days to your life’ with premium travel, all without the cumbersome price tag. In short, how can you reap the benefits of luxury travel without parting with excess money, and if you do choose to spend your money, will it be worthwhile? Unlike the anonymous reviews of TripAdvisor, 30% of which are deemed ‘suspicious’, and surface-level captions that commonly accompany travel images on Instagram, Jarvis commits to well-balanced, well-thought-out and unbiased reviews, backed by a firm understanding of the luxury market. At the same time as running his blog, he works full-time in finance in London, meaning he jets off on round-trips in a weekend, selectively choosing the best luxury airlines and hotels, and on the occasion he is hosted, it’s with a resolute understanding that any review will be royally non-partisan.

From an early age, Jarvis’ brain has been wired towards travel. Over nabbing the next crazy 21^st-century contraptions, his family budget was spent on visiting his mother’s family in Spain or summer camps in Europe to add second-language French and German to his Spanish native tongue. Travel was a constant, whether it was wandering among blueprints for new models of Concordes at his engineering grandfather’s house in England and gawping at framed pictures of him with the development team, or sneaking into the cockpit on the flight deck to pick the pilot’s brain while his mother slipped into the smoker’s section. When he grew older, he began to seek out his own travel encounters, beginning with living in China in 2003 and, later, training in jujitsu on a trip from Estonia to Japan, chomping on Pot Noodles brought from a Moscow supermarket on the Trans-Siberian railway, and laying low in a Mongolian youth hostel in the middle of a revolution. This is where he had his first taste of travel writing, with his earliest WordPress blog, The Manly Odyssey, scrawled from bunk beds and train cabins while parts of parliament were still burning.

However, in 2010, Jarvis’ outlook on travel changed, from one of bunk-sharing in youth hostels, to a more opulent and free-flowing style of travel: business class with some of the best luxury airlines. Living in Bangkok, his friend arranged a trip to Australia for 50 dollars apiece, and suddenly Jarvis was spun into a sphere of airport lounges, cascading champagne, and next-level service. A switch flicked – ‘I thought, I need to figure out how he’s done this, and I need to do more of it,’ says Jarvis. With that, Jarvis descended into the forums of FlyerTalk, WhatsApp groups, and internet supernovas. ‘There were so many people on this forum at the time, writing about, here’s my 24-hour flight to Taipei and back. It looked and sounded incredible. Some of these deals on flights with air miles, it was not only easy to do, but people were regularly doing it and meeting up with each other to have a beer and fly back again,’ Jarvis says. With that, he began hatching his own convoluted trips, plying air miles and loyalty programmes, to reap the benefits of luxury travel for less money.

While others might guard their travel formulas, Jarvis has spent years of gathering crazy little trips and extensive research, and channelled it into his blog, so that others can have the tools they need to share in the pleasures of luxury travel. At the beginning of his research, Jarvis realised that behind every customer loyalty scheme by every hotel chain or airline, there’s a human being, and given the labyrinth of global air travel and its elaborate pricing gimmicks, there’s almost always a loophole travellers can tap into, or some niche little trick that will emerge that most people will overlook. ‘Once you discover these things, you can do really amazing trips for almost no money at all,’ he says. One such journey was a trip to Vietnam. When an airfare popped up for £650 per person for a round trip from Tunisia to Vietnam, with an added bonus of an extended stopover in Paris, Jarvis booked instantly. Then, he built the building blocks around it, purchasing a one-way ticket to Tunisia from London, before flying direct to Paris, and making his way home to London on a return flight. That way, Jarvis could return to London for three months, before finishing off his three-stop holiday with another weekend in Paris and a 30^th birthday celebration in Vietnam.

Working in a full-time job in finance, flying for a weekend in some obscure country on a Friday night and beginning the Monday morning commute to work on a flight from Sao Paulo or Tunisia is pretty normal for Jarvis. Over time, he has accumulated a decent holiday allowance which he allocates to travelling and having this as a separate career affords him a level of freedom to execute unbiased reviews. ‘I’m not beholden to the whims of a marketing person. I have the option to afford to pay to stay somewhere that interests me and the luxury of being able to give honest reviews,’ he says. As for the times where he works with a property and their stipulated deliverables request a positive review, Jarvis pushes back. ‘If I’ve gone out of my way to reach out to a property, generally speaking, I already have a pretty good idea that it’s going to be a decent place to stay. But what I don’t do is guarantee that my review is going to be positive,’ he explains. What you get is unfiltered honesty, a ruthless checklist for luxury products, and the rarity of a well-balanced and fully researched review.

Having travelled with the world’s best luxury airlines and hotels or resorts for seven years, Jarvis certainly knows the innards of each luxury experience, and what makes one product stand out from the other. When it comes to business-class and first-class travel, after airfare and location, he believes the most important aspects are consistency in service and product. Luxury travel should ‘add days to your life,’ after all. This is why Singapore airlines’ remarkable hardware, free-flowing Dom Perignon and caviar, and double bed linens, always consistent, leads the way. ‘It’s elegant and understated start-to-finish. They deliver an unreal level of training and understanding. The way crew carry themselves you don’t find on other airlines,’ he explains. Secondly, Qatar’s business Q suites are a remarkable product in his eyes, with closing doors and a contraption to covert your space into a double bed or quad suite as revolutionary, the dining on demand a first-class level of personalisation.

For hotels and resorts, location is again number one. ‘You don’t want over-water villas in Blackpool, you want those to be in the Maldives. You could be in the nicest rooms in the city, but if it’s in Watford instead of Regent Street, well, it’s not that nice,’ he says. Aside from that, hotels must pass a basic checklist in every review. If a European city tries to pass a two-in-one shower and bath as luxury, or if sachets of Nescafe are on the menu rather than an espresso machine, they don’t quite make the cut. Sleep quality and service are also paramount, says Jarvis, and this is what you get at hotels like the Four Seasons, which come with in-app butler service and concierge at the tap of a finger for a fully personalised stay. However, while Jarvis has an eye for what makes a product exceptional, his aim is never to say this is the best property or product ever. ‘All I can say is what are the things I particularly like and how does it compare to something similar that I have personally experienced?’ he explains.

In a world of travel photos accompanied by inspirational quotes that have little relevance to the content and little practical use to travellers, it’s often hard to find reviews that compare one product to another accurately and dispassionately. ‘I’m ultimately here to do nothing other than to give an accurate representation of how products stack up and how they compare to one another,’ Jarvis explains. This is what Jarivs wants visitors to take from his blog, Instagram, and TikTok – consistent reviews, without the frills, and after that, everything else should be easy.