The Future of Travel Is Emotional

For almost two decades, Black Tomato has been redefining luxury travel—not by offering the lavish resorts or five-star amenities so often prioritized by the industry, but by curating deeply personal and emotionally driven experiences for its clients. As an antidote to perfunctory bucket list travel, the company has built its philosophy around the “pursuit of feeling” that we find while traveling but not in our everyday lives. Travel can feel transactional, but Black Tomato cofounder and luxury travel expert Tom Marchant is determined to make travel as personal as possible, one experience at a time. Here, he shares insight into his company, the industry, and the transformational impact of travel.

You’ve built Black Tomato around the idea of emotional travel. How did that concept first come to life? Why did you choose to categorize experiences by feelings as opposed to destinations?

In the beginning, many of our friends and colleagues didn’t know where they wanted to travel—but they knew how they wanted to feel. There are lots of destinations and things to do in the world, but travel hadn’t quite been brought to life in a way that focused on feeling. Even before we started the company, we would go off in pursuit of feelings and emotions.

When we launched the company, we didn’t list any destinations; everything was categorized according to emotional need. It was a totally different way of looking at it. It was also in the days when the word experience was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.

Oftentimes our job is to ask the questions that people are asking of themselves. It’s almost like being a therapist. Some other companies make it quite easy by going for a short-term sale. With us, we like to ask our clients what it is they’re really looking for. What place will make you feel inspired? Feel challenged? As such, the pursuit of feeling has always been a part of our DNA—because in life, whether through travel or not, emotional well-being has become super important.

How exactly does your “Pursuit of Feeling” platform work? What role does AI play in shaping your travel recommendations?

Our whole idea is that your travel, and your body, keep the score. We’ve been working on our “Pursuit of Feeling” platform for a long time. There, we’ve created many travel experiences and sorted them according to key emotional categories: being revitalized, challenged, contented, or distracted, for example. You can interact with and search these categories in a really interesting way.

In terms of AI technology, AI has become the language of business, hasn’t it? Our whole goal here is to enhance the customer experience. We want to celebrate the best of our human insight and passion. Our AI tech can smooth the process; it pulls from our own data, from our own trips and insights, so it’s not something that’s going out into the vastness of the Internet and gathering random information. We call it our feelings engine: You can have a conversation with our AI about how you want to feel on your trip, and it will come back to you with suggestions and direct you to an experience that will best embody that feeling. And then, of course, we’ll put you in touch with our human experts to bring it all to life.

You’ve spoken about travel as a form of self-discovery. Can you share a personal experience in which travel allowed you to shed personal or societal expectations?

Our customers don’t necessarily want to go places just because people are talking about them. It’s with the rough-and-ready stuff where you’re going to have the best memories, the best experiences, and the best lens into a place. I remember being in Delhi once, and my guide kept asking where I wanted to go. I said, “Just take me to where you would like to go, okay?” At first, he pulled up outside the Oberoi Hotel—and I said, “No disrespect, but no thanks.” Then we ended up going on this rickshaw right into the guts of Old Delhi. There’s this tiny hole in the wall, with clay oven cooking and the best tea in the world, and it’s where his mother’s best friend had been working for decades. We just sat there together. It was dreamy.

This is what people actually want, regardless of level: a feeling of discovery, of living like a local. It’s so lucky to be able to dip into the world and see it as it is, and there’s so much more reflection in a place like that than, say, a fancy restaurant or hotel. I know we’re all very fortunate to have those restaurants, but they tend to blur after a while—you could be anywhere, you know?

Many travel experiences today can feel overly curated. How do you ensure that the trips you design retain an element of spontaneity and genuine discovery?

About five years ago, we launched a service called Bring It Back, which was the creation of a series of inspirational itineraries. This service was where you would travel and spend time with different communities just to get an alternative take—from nomadic tribes in Mongolia to entrepreneurs in Iceland. And you bring everything you learn back home, even if it’s something you didn’t necessarily agree with, or something that would challenge your view.

When we think about wellness, it’s often very personal. I’ve always been a big believer of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and was looking at the way you journey through those needs, especially with self-actualization: what you know, how you feel fulfilled, and the values within yourself. It’s not defined by others. Travel is a wonderful vehicle to answer questions that you might have about things that are fundamental in your day-to-day, but you don’t really get a chance. It might be a relationship, or health, or love, or business, but it’s hard to find the answers—except when you travel. You can so often find inspiration from others.

When we launched Bring It Back, it was well received. But I think we’re still catching up. We’re always looking for growth, looking to be challenged. And it’s possible to lose sight of what travel can do for you, beyond letting you recharge and relax.

So, beyond letting you recharge and relax, what does travel really do for you?

Ego-dissolution travel—when you feel invisible in a culture—is amazing. I often talk about the pursuit of anonymity: You’re not important, and it’s great. In fact, it’s one of the best things in the world. I remember before I started Black Tomato, I was working in Warsaw. There, I saw people wearing these hats—baker boy caps (this was before Peaky Blinders got popular!)—and I really liked them. I started wearing that cap around, too, and no one looked at me twice. It was great. Then when I came back to London and wore it around my friends, they all had such a strange reaction—so strange that I didn’t quite have the courage to keep wearing it. That all said, travel gives you a chance to do new things, to learn and be inspired, to allow your barriers to come down. In other words, it gives you permission to be yourself—even if that’s as simple as wearing a baker boy cap.

We’ve always aspired to lead our customers to a place they want to be in anyway. It can be hard to find a way there without guidance; people can miss out. There is always a “better” or more “profound” experience to be had. But travel is not always about epiphanies or transformations. Some of the best things I’ve had while traveling are the things that have scared me in the moment. It’s about the things that challenge you, that overwhelm you, that are unexpected to you. It’s about the whole full range of feelings.

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