After twelve years working in luxury travel, I started to realise something. My clients weren’t coming to me because they needed more choice. If anything, there was already far too much of it.

Finding a beautiful hotel has never been easier. Within minutes you can scroll through hundreds of options, compare rooms, read thousands of reviews and probably have an entire itinerary mapped out before you’ve spoken to another person.

But I think all that choice has actually made choosing the right place harder.

Every hotel describes itself as exceptional. Every list seems to feature the same names. Reviews are useful, but one person’s idea of perfection can be completely different to somebody else’s. And after years of doing this, I know that two equally brilliant hotels can be completely wrong for the same client.

That was really the starting point for The Canopy Collection.

I didn’t want to build the biggest collection

I wanted to build one I genuinely believed in.

I’d much rather recommend twenty hotels I understand well than have hundreds sitting on a website simply because they’re luxurious. Some are places I’ve stayed myself, others I’ve visited or spent time getting to know through the people behind them, and there are hotels still firmly on my research list.

They don’t all look the same and they certainly don’t all offer the same kind of luxury. That’s deliberate.

Small portfolio. Strong relationships.

That principle has been there from the beginning, and it probably sums up Canopy better than anything else I could write.

I want to know what a hotel is actually like beyond the beautiful photographs. Which room I’d choose. Who I'd send there and, just as importantly, who I wouldn't. What the food is really like. Whether the location works. What you can do beyond the hotel. And who to call when I want to make something special happen for a client.

Because that, to me, is where a travel advisor should actually add value.

Luxury means something different to me now

I've been lucky enough to stay in some extraordinary hotels over the years, and the longer I've worked in luxury travel, the less interested I've become in the traditional markers of luxury.

Of course I appreciate a beautiful room and a great pool. But those aren't usually the things I remember.

I remember the lodge where the guide completely changed the way I looked at the landscape around me. The tiny hotel where everyone knew our names by the second morning. The places where dinner turned into an entire evening because nobody was in a hurry to leave.

The hotels I love most tend to have personality. They're connected to where they are, they're run by people who genuinely care, and there is something about them that couldn't simply be recreated somewhere else.

Those are the places I want Canopy to be known for.

And then there’s The Journal

I knew quite early on that I wanted The Canopy Collection to be more than a portfolio of lovely hotels.

Travel has been such a huge part of my life for a long time. I've travelled alone, with friends, as a couple and now as a mum. I've dived in some incredible places, driven road trips that haven't quite gone to plan, eaten exceptionally well, stayed in hotels I never wanted to leave and occasionally discovered that somewhere I'd been desperate to visit wasn't actually right for me at all.

There are so many stories and bits of knowledge behind the itineraries I create that don't fit neatly into a hotel description.

The Journal is where all of that gets to live.

There'll be stories from our own travels and research trips, hotels I think are doing something particularly special, itineraries I've loved putting together and the occasional place I simply can't stop thinking about.

I'll share what I'd actually do, where I'd stay and the things I'd probably skip. And as we travel more for Canopy, you'll see plenty of what happens behind the scenes too.

I don't want it to become another collection of generic destination guides telling you the ten things you absolutely must do somewhere.

There are already plenty of those.

I want this to feel much more like sitting down with me and asking, “Right, what do you actually think?”

Because ultimately that's what The Canopy Collection is about.

Knowing our hotels. Knowing our clients. Being curious about the world. And making the right match between them.

If something you read here makes you discover somewhere you hadn't considered, look at a familiar destination differently or simply get excited about your next trip, then The Journal is doing exactly what I hoped it would.

Welcome to The Canopy Collection. And welcome to our Journal.