Rich pickings

The secretive publisher of the grandest ÿ and meanest ÿ 'destination report' tells Johnny Davis how to avoid the hoi polloi on your summer hols

Going anywhere nice for your holidays this year? The people at Nota Bene – or NB – are. They recently jetted over to Blakes in Amsterdam (£800 a night), checked into the Luxury Dolphin Suite at Sandy Lane, Barbados (£1,900 a night), and put their feet up in the four-bedroom penthouse at Point Grace in the Caicos Islands (£4,250 a night). Feeling inadequate yet? There's worse – the people from NB aren't doing all this for fun. No. It's their job!

NB is a sort of millionaire's travel guide. It's only available by subscription and costs £195 (ie the price of a small holiday) for 10 issues a year. It doesn't much look like a travel guide either. There are no pictures of Mr and Mrs Colgate punting a beachball to each other in the surf. Instead, it's a text-heavy, matt- finished, A5 tome with a cover that makes it look like an academic textbook. Each issue reviews the snootiest hotels and restaurants on offer at a smart location, with some high-flyer's travel news thrown in at the back.

But here's the rub. NB is entirely self-financed. Says the blurb: "NB is a totally independent, impartial and unique publication. We accept no free tickets, no complimentary stays. We travel anonymously and take most of our own photos. We provide something you will not find elsewhere." In the world of travel journalism (normal practice: journalist rings up hotel and says they'd like to write about hotel, said hotel – mindful of the good publicity this could generate – puts journalist up for free and chucks in all the extras, journalist has lovely time, hotel gets a glowing review), this is as unique as it is expensive.

Given that NB has just 2,000 subscribers and carries not one page of advertising, you don't have to be Gordon Brown to work out that (a) they're operating at a colossal loss and (b) they must be bankrolled by someone with very big pockets.

The owner of the pockets is a businessman called Julian Pennington. He's not really called that, but since the point of NB is that it's all anonymous, I'm not allowed to tell you his real name. But if you try and imagine what a Julian Pennington might look like and sound like, you'll be right: immaculately spoken and dressed, a little grey and with more than a touch of the Kenneth Williamses about him. (When Pennington uses the pronoun "we" it's not clear whether he's referring to "NB, the staff of", or using it in a more royal sense.)

Anyway, we meet for camomile tea at Claridge's in London, which is good fun for me because NB has recently reviewed Claridge's and told its readers that they should "avoid the weekend crowd as it can be suspect". Surely Claridge's isn't too downmarket for Mr Pennington? "No, we do like Claridge's," he says. "We're not necessarily convinced that having a Gordon Ramsay restaurant in it is a good idea. You get the wrong crowd at the bar." This sort of thing, you will see, is another reason why Pennington and NB do well to remain anonymous.

For his day job, Pennington does something staggeringly well-paid in the property business. One day, he and his wife were flying to New York. In Pennington's in-flight magazine was one of those "10 best hotels in the world" articles. Pennington was not at all impressed. Ever since he was a little boy he'd been fascinated by travel and by the possibilities of escape found at luxury hotels. And the magazine article was hopelessly out of date. Some of the places had shut even down. He could have come up with a better list himself. Around the same time, one of Pennington's friends, a journalist, was writing a piece on dining in the Caribbean. Mindful of her fast-approaching deadline, she called Pennington and wondered if, since he travelled a lot, he could tell her what he thought the 10 best restaurants in the Caribbean were?

"Well, I was flattered to be asked," he says. "But, do you know, when the feature came out they'd printed word for word almost exactly what I said! Anyway, my wife said, 'Maybe you should do your own project.' I thought, 'I do want to do something creative. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life just dealing with houses.' And that's how NB started."

There was massive capital investment at the start. NB is now just over two years old, and Pennington hopes to turn a profit by year five. "It's like any business," he says. "If you open a restaurant, it's a million pounds or whatever, and you have to wait to get your investment covered."

NB's subscriptions are on the up – but since Penning- ton is concerned with getting the right sort of subscribers, this is slower than it might be, relying as it does on word-of-mouth and the targeting of mailing lists from art galleries and flash car companies. Gwyneth Paltrow and Tim Rice chose their holidays using NB, as do plenty of captains of industry. As for those who get to work for NB, Pennington has assembled a team already experienced in the travel business, or hotels or the media.

NB reviewers are meticulous. They visit their hotels and restaurants armed with a Weapons-Inspector-sized checklist. It pays off: the reviews not only tell you what to order on the menu, they tell you the right table to sit at and the best waiter to order from. As such, auditions for the job of NB reviewer are rigorous. (Believe me, I asked.) Pennington often takes wannabe reviewers to a hotel and asks them to review the tea being served. If all this sounds like it's taking the fun out of trying to choose a good place to go on holiday, it shouldn't. Pennington is just making sure they get it right. And in fact, NB is a chatty, catty and funny read. For example, the Hotel Ritz in Madrid gets this curt advice: "1. Appoint a top interior decorator. 2. Discard the acres of ghastly over-patterned carpets ('Don't look down', is our advice). 3. Rejuvenate the service." And when the hinge on a bedroom door at the Westin Excelsior in Venice spitefully chose the moment NB checked in to fall off, the staff got a pasting for taking 15 minutes to come and fix it. (Worse still, the breakfast buffet was crowded and NB was made to feel "somehow as if we were on a cheap package holiday".)

NB, perceptive readers will have spotted, is not for everyone. It deals with the kinds of holiday locations you don't find at Thomas Cook. But then, it's aimed at the kind of holidaymakers who have never heard of Thomas Cook. "I suppose we are a bit snobby, but in the context of what these hotels are about, that's our job," says Pennington. "We're a luxury brand. Plus, it's not always the most expensive places we go for. We love to find properties that are unique."

Pennington is endlessly proud of NB. He believes he's providing a unique service. As he points out, if you're in the market for a holiday that costs tens of thousands of pounds, why not spend the extra £195 on NB to make sure you visit the best places? Plus, he's not afraid to tip over some sacred cows. You can only imagine the maître'd's face at the Hotel Cipriani – also in Venice – after discovering his establishment was deemed to be "resting sleepingly, and somewhat arrogantly, on its laurels".

It is a source of no small pleasure to Pennington that many hotels and restaurants often sharply pull their socks up following an unfavourable comment in NB. "When you're spending that amount of money, then you should be getting many, many things. And some of these places simply don't deliver," he says.

And let's face it, if you're the man from NB who's considering whether something is or isn't good value for money, having to stump up for it yourself is likely to sober up your critical faculties fast. Who knows, one day maybe all travel guides will be made this way. "Um, NB is a destination review," corrects Pennington.

Well, quite.

For more information on 'Nota Bene' visit www.nbreview.com