Sienna Charles founder went her own way to serve the ultra-wealthy

What does Sienna Charles, a travel concierge company serving ultrahigh-net-worth clients, do differently than other agencies?

“Everything,” said founder and CEO Jaclyn Sienna India.

India refuses to join a consortium (“absolutely hate them,” she said). Her 10 travel advisors only sell products that India herself has personally vetted. Clients will receive a response to communications with the company in five minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“When I started the company 16 and a half years ago, I had my own take,” India said. “I didn’t want to do certain trips. I didn’t want to go to Virtuoso Travel Week. It took longer. It was a harder path because I didn’t join a company, become an IC, get to meet everybody — it’s a harder path, but it’s been a way more successful one. I think what I offer, what I believe in, has truly stood the test of time.”

India’s clients seem to agree, and they pay a sizable sum for Sienna Charles’ service. An annual retainer starts at $75,000 and goes up to $150,000, based on the service level a client wants. Right now, there’s a wait list to become a client. 

Before starting the company, India was studying art history and working at a five-star restaurant in Philadelphia. Watching the restaurant’s clientele drive up in Rolls-Royces with beautiful gowns turned her head to the world of the ultrarich, she said. She would also watch the chef, who was obsessed with the food and knew where all of the ingredients were sourced.

India said she has long felt that obsession for quality, having always had what she describes as “an expectation of how I wanted things.” Even as a 10-year-old, she asked McDonald’s for “new” fries every time she visited, ensuring they were fresh and hot out of the fryer. 

“I started to study the ultrahigh-net-worth, where they would ask for things from me, and I wanted to deliver it to them, but I wanted to understand why they asked for it that way,” India said.

After graduating from college, she moved to Palm Beach, Fla., and started working at a travel agency. The trips the agency planned were “fine,” she said, but the agents often didn’t know the destination or offer more nuanced services like restaurant reservations.

“The trip was fine, no issues,” she said. “But it was like, how do you take such a glamorous part of somebody’s life, such a detail-driven thing, and how do you make it better?”

Her answer was what she wanted to bring to travel: “obsession” for the product, the service and delivering the product to the client.

“Really, my ethos in the last almost 17 years has really never changed,” India said. “It’s always been the obsession for service and then understanding the product.”

The business has gone through changes since its founding. For instance, the fee to work with Sienna Charles 10 years ago was $500, considered expensive at the time. That rose to $1,000 or $2,500, depending on the itinerary, in 2015. The current model — an annual membership retainer — launched in 2019.

Today, Sienna Charles’ clients are usually between age 40 and 75. Their net worth is a minimum of $100 million, a number that rises into the billions with some clients. Their home bases are usually New York, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and Palm Beach (although, India said, they are almost always traveling).

Clients paying a retainer of $75,000 receive unlimited travel planning and restaurant reservations; Sienna Charles sees an average of 110 to 145 requests a year from those clients. In the higher tier of $150,000 annually, clients receive more of a “lifestyle package,” with things like spa appointments at their homes and private chef recommendations. Sienna Charles will also help with requests like second citizenship or finding an estate manager for their homes.

India is also in the process of working on a new, lower-price product for those interested in working with Sienna Charles who can’t swing a $75,000 annual retainer.

India said she believes the travel industry “celebrates sameness,” partly the reason for her disdain for consortia.

Advisors tend to use the same suppliers and DMCs and post the same pictures on social media, she said. She even contends that joining a consortium can make an advisor “lazy.”

“You can log in, see the top quote-unquote six best hotels in Paris, and you feel quite confident that you want to book one of those hotels for your client, because it feels like a home run,” she said.

India argues that any time a product is sold, whether it’s travel or something else, the seller needs to know it “intimately,” having seen and experienced it themselves. 

To that end, Sienna Charles keeps a database of around 2,500 vendors that India has personally tested and retested. That is the pool from which its advisors draw when booking clients.

By remaining independent of a consortium and paying her own way for travel, India said, she is beholden to no one in what Sienna Charles books for clients.

“I purposely pay for my own trips. If a product sucks, I’m happy to say it, and it doesn’t go into the database,” India said. “And I don’t owe anybody anything.”