After Bruce Jones sold his company, , in 2022, the now 68-year-old mulled a trip. Not a quick getaway, though, but a months-long adventure—he was determined to circumnavigate the globe. An inveterate traveler who grew up partly in the Philippines and has visited more than 120 countries, Jones had nurtured the dream for some time.
So he and his wife, Liz, a fellow licensed pilot, invested in a twin-engine Diamond DA62 and started flying it on short hops, road-testing it for comfort. It failed—big time. “Twelve hours in a smaller airplane, where you can’t move around and there’s no bathroom? Liz wasn’t comfortable with that,” Jones says.
The Idaho-based couple sold the plane and started looking for an alternative way to fulfill that globe-spanning wanderlust—which is how we’ve come to find ourselves chatting somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, relaxing in comfy armchairs on an Airbus A340 jetting toward Tahiti. Jones out-sourced his dream to , signing up with the French firm for its 22-day private-jet trip around the world. Priced from about $104,000 per person, the journey includes all transportation and activities as well as five-star hotels in roughly a dozen ports of call, plus excursions to major sites such as the Taj Mahal and Machu Picchu.
Jones might not be piloting this plane, but at least it has a bathroom—several, in fact. There’s a substantial wine list, too. (No self-respecting French travel operator would offer just a single variety of Champagn.