“I remember talking to my son (who is working with Greedy in Elite) about how one day we would be global and he said, ‘Dad, we are global now’. It took me a while to get that.”

It was also natural that Greedy, who spent the best part of his career with Leading Hotels of The World leading the charge in Asia Pacific for the representation and marketing company, would establish his new business in a field he knew well.

Asked why he started Elite, he laughed, “To raise income and make money, what do you think?

“But it’s also an area I know well and there is no organization right now that provides a customized version of a mixture of public relations, advertising, customer relationship management in a cost effective way that focuses on resorts and resort properties.”

According to Greedy, representation companies do not customize given the huge number and range of properties they represent.

Currently, Elite represents 61 resorts in 14 countries and his target is to reach 150 “that fit our criteria”.

He admits it’s been challenging building the business – individual resorts and properties are difficult to aggregate. “I knew the resorts from past experience, I knew who I wanted and it’s been a job of personal curation.”

But thus far, he’s done a fairly decent job of curating resorts by country, styles and settings. Elite’s definition of resorts extends to ships, trains, safaris and private islands. It also has interesting features such as a search tool that allows you to state your interests and find a resort or experience match. 

His fee is US$10,000 a year for marketing and representation. More than a year into the business however, he said his clients are now asking him to move into transactions and so he is seeking travel agent partners for fulfillment.

“I have tried to avoid it but our members want it, and so do our resorts,” he said.

“The future of individual resorts is underpinned by the Internet and consumers are moving to the web. This is the new world model of doing business and travel agents are also going online.”

Currently, he has 4,000 upscale travel consultants and 85,000 consumers on his database.

“We haven’t reached critical mass yet. There are some beautiful resorts out there that nobody knows about. They can’t afford to go online nor do they know how to do it,” said Greedy.

He does not see himself as directly competitive with representation companies such as Leading Hotels or Small Luxury Hotels. “We say we are supplementary, we create additional marketing support customized to the resort’s needs.

“We don’t take kudos for saying we have 20,000 resorts. 150 would be good enough for us.”