Black Tomato

Black Tomato is a bespoke travel company, not a booking desk, and the difference shows in how it works. Three friends, Tom, James and Matt, started it in 2005, and it now plans tailor-made trips across all seven continents from its base in New York. You brief a designer on how you want to travel, and they build the itinerary around that brief rather than pulling a set package off a shelf. The team is stacked with people who have done the thing they sell, including former conservationists and wildlife photographers, and the firm sits inside the trade networks that matter, with Virtuoso and IATA membership behind it.

What sets Black Tomato apart is the pair of things it does that almost nobody else attempts. The first is Blink, a service that builds a private camp for you in places where no hotel exists. The company constructs the whole site before you arrive and takes it down after you leave, so you sleep in what it calls collapsible hotel suites, with real beds, electricity and proper facilities, in landscapes like Patagonia, the salt flats of Bolivia, the Grand Canyon, Iceland and Morocco. A private chef comes with it, and the days are filled with whatever the setting allows, from foraging to riding to climbing. Because it runs on raw land, Blink cannot be set up in cities or inside most national parks, which is part of why the locations feel untouched.

The second is Get Lost, and it is the boldest idea in luxury travel right now. You pick an environment, polar, jungle, desert, mountain or coastal, or leave it to chance, and Black Tomato drops you into it with a mission to find your own way through. You train for the terrain first, then navigate offline between check points using what3words, the grid that gives every three metre square a unique three word address. It sounds reckless until you learn that an expedition operations team tracks you the whole time as a silent safety net, stepping in only if it has to. Get Lost starts at around twenty thousand pounds per person based on two travelling, and that covers the planning, the in-country logistics, specialist guides, the training, the equipment, domestic travel and most meals.

Not everything is an expedition. Black Tomato also runs Field Trip and Set Jetting, and the bulk of its work is still classic tailor-made travel, a honeymoon routed properly, a family trip that keeps three generations happy, a first look at a country you have always meant to see. The house style is the same across all of it. Someone who has actually been there designs the trip, local teams run it on the ground, and the logistics are handled so quietly that you only notice them when a transfer that could have gone wrong simply does not.

The one honest caveat is that this is a studio built for people who want travel to do something to them, so if all you want is a quiet week on a lounger, you are paying for design skill you will not fully use. Choose Black Tomato when the trip has a point, a milestone, a reset, or a place that has sat on your list for years, and you want it planned by people who treat that as the whole job. On that brief, very few operators in the world match it, which is why it holds a place near the top of this ranking.