PHILLIPE KJELLGREN US7 :5nov 25/6/09 08:43 Page 79
“I love a little bit of everything in life.” That
statement, more than any other, sums up the
world of Philippe Kjellgren, an entrepreneur
and world traveler who turned his love for the
good life into a successful business. The
president and founder of Kiwi Collection, a
website popular with in-the-know travelers
looking for the very best in high-end hotels,
Kjellgren was, quite literally, born to do this job.
he son of a diplomat was raised all over Africa, mainly in
T
the French-speaking parts, attending nine schools through-
out his youth. After he returned to his native Sweden, he
got involved in the fashion industry, gaining the exclusive
rights to many luxury brands. His retail experience led him
to develop a successful point-of-sale system – the cashier’s
checkout system in every business establishment – but
even with these successful endeavors, his love of travel never abated.
“I had many friends who were too spoiled and rich for their own good, and they
had a lot of money but hadn’t traveled very widely. I had traveled so many places,
over 100 countries now, so they all wanted recommendations when they traveled.”
The constant need for recommendations from even the most privileged of people
showed him an opening in the travel industry that he could fill.
“It’s very hard to find trusted advice, and even then people have different
tastes. This is for my category of people, people who are very traveled and very
used to luxury. There are other niche sites for, say, high-design hotels. But even
then, those are not necessarily luxury hotels, they can be fairly basic in terms of
service but simply be highly designed, because that’s what some people are look-
ing for.” And so the Kiwi Collection was born, a repository for all of Kjellgren’s
personal experience and a vehicle through which he could continue to explore
the very best of the world’s offerings.
The ideal Kiwi Collection user is a high-end traveler, spending at the very
least about $500 a night, or the equivalent of $500 a night in the local market. “In
New York, $500 a night is luxury, but it is fairly usual, in a little village in South
America that a $60 a night hotel might be a $500 hotel experience. The bar has
been raised all over the world, and is rising all the time,” Kjellgren says. “A five-
star hotel 10 years ago would not be a five-star hotel now; a three-star hotel now
is better than some five-stars then.”
Photographer Paul Joseph. Orig. Published in Elegant Bride
100 Thousand Club 79
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