I Spent 72 Hours Partying at a Luxury Music Festival in Switzerland
But as I danced, waiting for the sushi boat to be replenished yet again, I found myself asking, who are music festivals even for anymore?
It’s a balmy summer Saturday in Switzerland, and the crowd is nursing lukewarm Aperol spritzes on the poop deck of Lake Geneva’s oldest sailboat. Although high heels are strictly forbidden to avoid destroying the centuries-old wood floorboards of the Neptune, everyone there is dressed to impress. A crowd of no more than 30 sways together in front of the DJ booths, reminiscing about their last few days spent in the Alps.
“It’s hard to beat the feeling of being on the water with great music and friends,” says Devon Jordan, taking a brief moment of respite with her newfound crew. The night had not even begun.
It had already been a weekend of excess for the 29-year-old IT manager, who traveled from Florida to the Cercle Moment by herself. She’d already made friends with the other attendees of W Hotels x Cercle bonanza, a glamorous bunch that included young CEOs and prominent strip club owners, models, and close personal friends of the Kardashian family. I’d spent the past 72 hours among them, dancing my heart out in chalets and secret basement clubs. We’d shared overflowing sushi boats and champagne, massages and hotel suites with fireplaces, and views of the Alps. The windows looked like framed Impressionist paintings.
Sunset on the Neptune was just the cherry on top. “The boat is where we sealed the friendships that were forming,” says Upasana Kartik Garg, a 31-year-old writer whose family owns what she said was the oldest jewelry house in India. “We connected on a spiritual level.”
In all, more than 32 million Americans pack up to go to music festivals every year, perhaps because they’ve long been seen as a budget option—an accessible way to see tons of bands in one place. But Coachella now costs up to $599 for a general admission ticket and a cool $1,399 for VIP (to say nothing of the sumptuous yurts priced at $32,000 for two people—up from $25,000 in 2017).
Meanwhile, Cercle, started by DJs Derek Barbolla and Philippe Tuchmann, has taken this trend toward luxury music travel to a whole new level by pairing electronic music with the natural wonders of the world. The shows are intimate—and exclusive. Think Disclosure atop a waterfall in Croatia’s Plitvice’s National Park, or Bedouin in Al Kazneh, a temple in Petra, Jordan. All it took for my new friends in Switzerland to attend their latest event was the equivalent of $3,743.37 (plus airfare and the occasional $73 fish taco, because the Alps are notoriously expensive.)
As a member of the press, I was a guest at the event, unburdened by such expenses. But as I danced, waiting for the sushi boat to be replenished yet again, I found myself asking, who are music festivals even for anymore?
Garg was living in India in 2015 when she heard about Cercle throwing a rave in an ancient military fort in a nearby town. Her interest was piqued but she had no idea how people even found out about these shows in advance. As it would turn out, the mystery was by design. The guest selection process for Cercle is shrouded in secrecy, so much so that whole Reddit threads are dedicated to cracking the code. The company announces events via cryptic social media posts and for Garg and Jordan—who were both lucky enough to be plucked off the waitlist for the four-day experience in the Swiss Alps—getting a ticket felt like winning the lottery.
Upon arrival, the two women checked into their suites at W Verbier and spent their days going on scenic hikes, paragliding above the Alps, and getting facials with products made of locally grown Edelweiss. Jordan even took it upon herself to add on helicopter skydiving, which was on her bucket list. As the group moved through Switzerland together, taking in the sights and sounds of a European summer and seeing new music every night, they became very close.
The Cercle experience is extremely curated. Guests from all over the world take over a monument or historical landmark for a night and then depart. As I boarded my flight back from Switzerland, it all felt like a fever dream. Could I say that I’d seen Switzerland? Not exactly.
I called Shain Shapiro, who writes about music and urban policy, hoping to get his take on the growing marriage of tourism and music—to try to chip away at the direction elite experiential travel is heading. His view was that the ritual around seeing music holds inherent value, while the whole point of tourism is to get people to think slightly differently about themselves and about a place because they visit it. “But we as human beings are always attracted to the shiniest things,” he told me.
Cercle does shiny well, which is part of the appeal for someone like Garg, whose background is literally in diamonds. The experiences are all curated for travelers looking for maximum enjoyment and once-in-a-lifetime experiences. “I'm looking at something where the sheets are a certain kind of cotton, and there will be someone telling me exactly what to do based on the person I am, something they're reading off me,” as she put it. “A little bit of exclusivity would be nice, too.”
When it comes to picking travel destinations, Garg said she acknowledged that social media put pressure on her to look like she was living it up in luxury resorts. But she said that she would rather, for instance, go burrata hunting with a local family in Puglia than eat all her meals in the lobby of a five-star hotel.
“I'm always looking for the subculture in the city and how to bring that out,” she told me.
This was from an Airbnb in Sri Lanka, where she had gone to surf.
Jordan and Garg are already planning to reunite in France this summer for a sequel. Cercle’s next installment will be held at the National Air Space Museum of France. Jordan is running point on finding accommodation for their group of 15, while Garg and her husband plan to take everyone to the Soho House for a little relaxation in between the sweaty dance floors.
Now based in Dubai, Garg travels for six months of the year when the desert heat becomes untenable—she says that she actually spends less money traveling to surf and dance than she would living at home full time. Up next is dancing under the world's largest passenger aircraft, in front of a 54-meter-high rocket, and between two supersonic planes. “One of the parties will be in the Eiffel Tower and they are teaching guests to fly a plane,” said Garg with a grin.
Music is a major reason to travel—and it gets people on planes regardless of their access to expendable income (see: people spending their savings to travel to the cities where Beyonce and Taylor Swift were touring). At a certain point, though, we must decide for ourselves what the point of travel is—whether it’s to immerse ourselves in local culture or to fist-bump 31,000 feet in the air.