The thrillseekers who pay to be faux-kidnapped on holiday

Times

a day ago

The chief executive knew something was wrong when a group of people rushed into his office in San Francisco, blindfolded him and bundled him out into a car and then onto a plane. He had no idea what he would encounter on landing: still wearing the same suit he had put on that morning, he was dropped alone into the searing heat of the Costa Rican jungle. It quickly became clear he was surrounded and that the jungle was teeming with people. There were his kidnappers, for one thing, but also a militia force, who would instantly recognise his potential value for ransom if they could snatch him from his original captors.
For hours, scrambling alone through the undergrowth, he dodged them, before finally building a makeshift shelter from a few branches and crawling into it to endure a long, hot, weary night. This was a guy of average fitness level and far from SAS-calibre survival skills; the situation was a true test of his grit and determination. Only the next morning did he manage to persuade a friendly local to let him make a phone call, summoning a rescue helicopter. Even as it landed, he ran to board in a hail of gunfire …
'It was all blanks, though,' says Vivienne Errington-Barnes, owner of Shift + Alt, an experience planning firm. 'That grand finale was very Hunger Games-esque.' In fact, the entire scenario had been staged at the request of the captive in question, and he had paid to be put through it: a 36-hour endurance test, with a price tag of $7 million.
Among ultra-high-net-worthers, it's no longer enough to score the top penthouse in peak season on the Amalfi coast or even to splurge on a ticket to space. The ultimate vacation flex involves stepping into your own movie, storylined, staffed with actors and staged just for you. 'We have a cast of 100, and an audience of one — that's why it's so expensive,' Errington-Barnes says.
The idea for these adventures, she explains, came from conversations with clients for whom she threw events — mostly Silicon Valley types. They would often casually — and enviously — mention the David Fincher-directed 1997 film The Game starring Michael Douglas as a San Francisco-based investment banker. 'His brother buys him this experience that brings him close to committing suicide, but he suddenly values his life,' she says. Soon she and her team realised their clients — many of them tech CEOs in California, because 'European clients don't spend money in this way' — might pay for a VIP IRL experience partly inspired by The Game.
She launched the idea in 2021, and has staged seven such scenarios since then, ranging in cost from $100,000 to millions. She emphasises that her clients are psychologically evaluated at the outset to ensure their mental fitness for the experience, before she and her team engage with their closest associates and family in planning and some logistics, such as obtaining passport numbers and evaluating access to planes (the plane used in that chief executive's scenario was actually his own).
There are limits to what she can do — no clearing of bank accounts as in The Game, for example — and clients will know the Shift + Alt team is at work if they've hired them themselves, albeit with only a vague sense that the adventure might begin within a six-month window. Each is tailor-made, of course, but Errington-Barnes says there's one consistent element. 'For us, the goal is transformation — how can they come out the other side and feel a different way about themselves? Feel capable of doing new things?' she says. 'Ideally there is some kind of fear, as it's very much a catalytic converter for our insights.'
Take another client, someone whom she calls 'fixated on their own mortality'. For him, they began by gaslighting him in his everyday life: a familiar, burly gas station attendant suddenly sporting bright pink lipstick out of nowhere, for example, to unnerve him and suggest his everyday reality was warping. Then he was kidnapped and trapped in a series of rooms that used optical illusions so they seemed to be shrinking, like something from Roald Dahl's The Twits. 'It was about losing your sanity a little bit, then via this immersive theatrical, surreal experience — and the old you is dead,' she says. The idea is that you're reborn, 'and you question how to go back to life and live it differently.'
The next step for Errington-Barnes's movie-inspired breaks is a rather meta development: she is prepping a reality TV show around them, which she is pitching to networks via a sizzle (demo) reel.
There are other companies that offer similar experiences, including Based on a True Story (holidays come with a detailed storybook keepsake documenting your adventure) and House of Dreammaker, which specialises in devising kismet-like moments while you travel — imagine arriving in a new country and turning on the radio in the car only to hear a welcome from the DJ, calling you out by name. The California-based adventure travel firm EXP regularly stages White Lotus meets Punk'd-style trips. Kevin Jackson, the owner, says these are growing in popularity — this year he'll run four of them, up from one or two five years ago.
Jackson's speciality is less white knuckle than Shift + Alt's nailbiters: he has thrown a Pirates of the Caribbean-themed trip for a family in the Bahamas, with a retrofitted pirate ship and a custom map for Blackbeard's treasure, while he time-warped a trio of Hong Kong-based businessmen back to the cowboy era, buying out Wyoming's Brush Creek Ranch as a backdrop and hiring hundreds of extras who were kitted out in period costumes.
'The day the group arrived, they got a letter from Wells Fargo that said: 'You've bought this property, and bandits are taking over — you need to come and save your land',' Jackson recalls. The only problem: shortage of funds. The friends had to do everything from branding cattle to moving hay bales to earn a unique wooden currency created for their trip. It culminated in a cattle drive to market, where they had to negotiate with a rancher to score the best price. 'It got to the point where he pulled out his gun — it looks and feels like you're not messing around,' Jackson says.
• 24 of Europe's best adventure holidays for all types of thrillseeker
That trip cost about $400,000 all-in. Another he planned, a secret agent-themed adventure for three American couples, cost a million dollars. Each received a briefcase that outlined their mission: a nefarious villain was aiming to destroy the blockchain and so upend the cryptocurrency world — could they stop him? The only other thing supplied: a place and time for meeting. In the run-up to that trip, the couples underwent extensive training with ex-Special Forces personnel on everything from how to pick a lock to target tracking in a crowded room. When they arrived at the rendezvous and took off in a charter plane, they were immediately told to skydive out of it before arriving at the villa where they would stay. The next day, there was a cocktail party filled with extras dressed as guests and staffers, among whom they had to find their mark, before a finale the following day on an explosives-rigged yacht. Of course, they managed to pull it off, like bitcoin-era James Bonds.
If you don't have a few million to drop on a trip — Shift + Alt's cheapest package is from about $100,000 (although it can do a party for about £5,000) — but like the idea, the closest thing might be a mystery flight, where a carrier offers you the chance to book a holiday without knowing the destination; Lufthansa Surprise, for example, which offers seats starting at €99. The destination specialist Journee will dispatch you on a surprise trip after you answer a ten-minute questionnaire about your travel likes and dislikes. It's not quite at private plane to the jungle level, but it could add a bit of a thrill.
Share your thoughts in the comments below