Day: August 23, 2025

• Chenin Matthews is the director of guest experience for the Four Seasons’ private jet.
• The hotel-and-resorts company runs trips that can cost over $240,000.
• Custom meals from the executive chef, and guests breaking into song are among the unique moments.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chenin Matthews, director of guest experience for the Four Seasons Private Jet. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I came straight from college as one of the managers in training at the Four Seasons Hualalai, in Hawaii. For the last three years, I’ve had the pleasure of calling the jet program my main focus.

Travel is often exciting just because of the end destination, but it can also be a bit cumbersome. That’s not the case with the Four Seasons jet.

It’s a customized Airbus A321, with 48 first-class lay-flat Italian leather seats, so it’s absolutely stunning. In the back, we have a standing-room lounge that creates this social atmosphere.

A normal week varies whether I’m grounded or in flight.

Grounded, it’s making sure that we feel really great with our logistics, working with our Four Seasons teams and properties.

When we are traveling with the guests, every three days you’re in a new destination. I’m on about four of these trips a year.

We’ve got some regional trips that are $148,000, and then we’ve got our longer, 24-day trips that are more from there.

Some of our guests are successful in their own world where they handhold every single detail, and then they’ve allowed us to step in and take over. It’s really interesting to see the relaxation that comes to them.

You never touch your luggage, you don’t have to worry about where your boarding pass is, or which gate you’re going to — we’re there all along the way.

We’re talking with the guests to make sure we are delivering any wants and needs, customizations, and bespoke experiences.

We have an executive chef doing the catering, so it is always going to be three courses.

They’re either focusing on something from where we just came or where we’re going. Coming out of Japan, we have some wagyu beef on board. That’s always a favorite.

Even though we have a menu, it doesn’t mean that’s where it stops.

Oftentimes, we’ll have requests from people who are missing a little bit of home, like an American-style grilled cheese. We had some British folks who were missing fish and chips, but our chef made sure to have it.

I couldn’t tell you my favorite itinerary. It’s like choosing your favorite child. They’re so diverse and they offer such different things.

Ancient Explorer, which we just launched for 2027, is very ambitious. We’re going to Petra, the Great Barrier Reef, Easter Island, and Bangkok — all over the place.

Uncharted Discoveries, the itinerary that takes you through Latin America, features Cartagena, one of our newer properties coming online, and a ship trip to Antarctica.

When I first started, we used to say it was once in a lifetime experience, and we had to remove that because we have people who keep coming back.

We have a fair amount of people who travel solo, but 24 days later, it’s a group of friendships.

There’s a bittersweet element to the last flight. Guests have broken out into song and dance. It was “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing.” One time, we had a captain on his last flight before retiring, and so people sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

I can’t say that there are any downsides to my job.

Part of the fun of travel is the unique moments that arise. There was a seaplane from another company that had an emergency landing, but there’s a reason that we have Champagne on board to stall us a little bit.

Sometimes it’s someone who has stumbled across a location that they remember from their honeymoon 20 years ago.

The first time I went to Bhutan with guests, people came out having emotional experiences from being up in Tiger’s Nest. It’s quite a pilgrimage to do the hike up there. Or when we go on a safari in the Serengeti and it’s people’s first time seeing a cheetah.

These moments are very powerful, to see how things unexpectedly touch people in different ways.

I was just on a trip a few months ago, and one of our guests was really touched by this moment that he had with a monk, so he actually wanted to donate about 2,000 kilograms of rice to this particular monastery.

Travel is intoxicating. To be able to experience, touch, and connect with different people, cultures, and food, is something that is special to me.

• Burning Man, the annual music and arts festival in the desert, is in a precarious financial situation.
• Last year, the organization behind the event operated at a financial loss.
• Ticket sales and donations are up this year, but the event, popular with the Silicon Valley elite, has not sold out.

The famously anti-capitalist festival Burning Man is in a bit of an ironic pickle: It needs money.

Burning Man Project, the nonprofit organization behind the annual event in Black Rock City, Nevada, is entering its 2025 festival on shaky ground.

“Everything is now at risk,” Marian Goodell, Burning Man Project’s CEO, wrote in a letter requesting donations after last year’s event.

Burning Man, which was born in San Francisco in the 1980s, has gained traction with Silicon Valley elite over the past few decades. Some of the richest names in tech, like Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page, are regular attendees. But in recent years, it has struggled to break even as the costs of putting on the festival have increased and sales of high-priced tickets have not kept up.

So far, things are looking up this year. The organization expects more than 70,000 attendees, a spokesperson told Business Insider. That’s more than the 69,141 who attended last year, according to the festival’s official dispatch.

Donations are also up year-to-date, Goodell said earlier this month. And the festival’s new dynamic ticketing system more accurately reflects its costs. Last year’s standard ticket price, $575, didn’t cover the organization’s cost per attendee, which sat at about $749 in 2023. This year, Burning Man tickets are priced on a transparent sliding scale from “give a gift” — any ticket priced above $750 — to “receive a gift” — the limited number of tickets priced below $750.

Goodell said Burning Man’s “financial outlook is much stronger than where we were a year ago,” when it operated at a financial loss in 2024.

Still, tickets for this year’s festival, which runs from August 24 to September 1, have not sold out as they did each year from 2011 to 2023, less those when the event was called off due to the pandemic. At its peak, in 2019, Burning Man hosted 78,850 attendees.

Last year, after higher-priced ticket sales did not meet expectations, the nonprofit raised its fundraising goal from $10 million at the beginning of the year to $20 million by November to address a shortfall. Thanks to 10% staff cuts and a surge in donations, it squeaked through.

In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, the organization’s expenses totaled $63.6 million, more than double what they were a decade prior, according to financial filings. Those expenses cover staff and year-round activities, as well as the festival’s basic infrastructure, like toilets, fuel, and medical staff.

Burning Man’s own principles are at odds with its fiscal well-being

Part of Burning Man’s financial problems lies in its very ethos. The event, which took on its current shape as a music and arts celebration in the desert in 1991, revolves around 10 principles, including “radical inclusion” and “decommodification.”

The former means the organization has been historically hesitant to raise ticket prices; it offers financial aid for those who qualify for reduced-priced tickets. For years, the standard ticket did not cover the average cost the organization bears per attendee; the discrepancy between the two peaked in 2022 when a standard ticket cost $475 and the actual cost per attendee was $676.

The event’s roots in “decommodification” mean it eschews corporate sponsorships or merchandise and concession sales that could subsidize ticket sales and donations. Similarly, the organization does not collect licensing fees from the many Burning Man regional offshoots that were attended by more than 100,000 people last year.

The armchair critic may be surprised that an event now synonymous with tech billionaires would be in financial straits. Some of the world’s richest men are regular attendees. But while Burners are getting richer — 37.2% earn between $100,000 and $300,000 annually, compared to 21% 10 years ago, according to an annual volunteer-run census — the majority still earn under $100,000 a year.

Some burners were not thrilled with Goodell’s calls to action last year, commenting on her posts with critiques about the amount that the organization spends on salaries and real estate (Goodell earned $391,000 in 2023, according to disclosures, and its office has an address in an expensive San Francisco area). Others said they want the nonprofit to focus on the annual Burning Man event, not its many charity initiatives, like the disaster relief project Burners without Borders and global artist grants.

The richest Burners have not spoken publicly about the festival’s finances, though they may very well be among those who donated to keep the festival afloat. While the organization does publish a list of donors, there is the option to remain anonymous. For all we know, Sgt Pepper Bm or Uncle Cornelius could be Dustin Moskovitz’s Burning Man alias.