People imagine we have a vetting system — questionnaires, standards documents, a scoring matrix. The truth is closer to this: I go for lunch. If there is no lunch, or lunch is somehow beside the point, that usually tells me everything the matrix would have.
A Verdara journey is really a chain of trust: you trust us, we trust our hosts, our hosts trust us with their kitchens and their names. Choosing partners is therefore the most important thing we do — more important than routes, more important than marketing — and we do it slowly, in person, and with three questions in mind.
The three questions
First: is this theirs? The quinta must be their quinta, the boat their boat, the recipe their grandmother’s. We don’t work with concessions, franchises, or ‘experiences’ assembled for tourism, because guests can smell the difference within minutes even when they can’t name it.
Second: does our being there help? A group of eight can be a gift to a small farm’s year or a burden on a fragile place; the same visit is not the same everywhere. We ask what our money funds, who it employs, what it displaces. Sometimes the honest answer is that a place is better off without an itinerary in it, and we leave it alone.
Third: do they want to say no to us? This one sounds strange, but it is the most reliable of the three. The best hosts have limits — weeks they won’t host, rooms they won’t let, things that are not for visitors. Partners who say yes to everything are performing hospitality. Partners who protect something are offering the real thing, and the real thing is the only thing worth travelling for.
Why we stay small
This way of choosing doesn’t scale, which is precisely why we run twenty-some departures a year and not two hundred. Every partner is someone Isla or I have eaten with, argued with, and gone back to. When that stops being possible, we will have become the kind of company we left. The lunch test keeps us honest — and extremely well fed.
