Are you the kind of traveller who longs to see things that others miss or can’t access? An artist’s studio; a private house; a beach shack restaurant only accessible by seaplane? Secret Trips is all about this sort of thing — but even we need some help occasionally. And that is where Anthony Lassman comes in.
A Brit who now lives in Lisbon, Lassman is the man behind Nota Bene, an organisation that creates travel experiences for its clients. He has subscribers from all over the world, and his team — who visit places to ferret out extraordinary access to special spots and experiences — are on hand to help plan trips that are genuinely out of the ordinary. “We recently curated a trip for a group of US veterans who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, to Paris, Versailles and Normandy,” says Lassman. “We got great private access to Notre-Dame and the Louvre, but the highlight was Normandy, where we had private access to the American Cemetery, chartered planes to fly over the beaches — Utah and Omaha — where the D-Day landings took place, and visited those beaches in Jeeps. We had a historian with us telling the story of what happened here, and even visited the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, which was so crucial in the landings, and met the son of the man who was the mayor there at the time.”
Nota Bene is the Latin for “note well”, and Lassman’s venture has its origins in his notebooks. While working as a chartered surveyor and property developer, he discovered that his first love was in fact travel, and he started to keep records of the places and people he’d met. “It’s all about characters,” he says today.
Lassman is himself quite a character, which is why, when his wife laid down a challenge to him, he gave up his job to start Nota Bene. “We’d been in New York. I was reading a magazine,” he explains. “And I said, ‘I don’t believe this journalist even stayed in this hotel!’ And she said, ‘You’ve spent your whole life critiquing everywhere you go, making copious notes of everything. Why don’t you do something yourself?’” He began by writing a series of travel guides using his own records and soon found an audience who liked his personal take on the places he’d visited. “They appealed to people who were comfortable in their own skin, confident in what they like; creative people who’ve been around the block. They weren’t interested in that perfect cookie-cutter experience — the perfect boat, the perfect hotel, everything squeaky clean. They were the kind that like to roll up their trousers and get their feet in the sand. These people consider too much perfection to be imperfect. It’s the messiness, the humanness that makes places interesting. It’s the characters, the people you meet, and it’s doing the thing your own way. Some people are frightened of that. Some people want to do the thing that is validated by everybody else. But I found a whole group of people who wanted to discover interesting things.”
Soon the readers of the books were asking for help to organise trips, and the publishing petered out, replaced by a travel service for those who like the surprise of the unknown — the “messiness”, as Lassman puts it.
“We’re not a concierge company,” he says. “That’s just about money. Anyone can go to the Oscars if you pay the right people. I’m not interested in that. I want to take people to the place in Borneo that will be magical for them, or organise for an art-loving couple bound for Colombia to visit Olga de Amaral at her studio — which I did.”
He also wants to introduce people to top restaurants, and that doesn’t necessarily mean Michelin-starred. “Real luxury is being somewhere you feel good, where you’re taken care of but you don’t have to plough through lengthy menus and complicated wine lists… like my favourite places in Lisbon where a waiter can just come along and say, ‘I’ve got this really great wine from the Douro Valley; I think you’ll love it.’”