If you had a spare £1,000,000 to spend on a single holiday, what would it get you?
Everything, apparently.
A beachfront Ibiza villa with uninterrupted sea views. Superyacht day trips, VIP tables at the island’s hottest nightclubs and around-the-clock chefs, bodyguards, masseuses and private chauffeurs. You could even have a doctor on standby to administer IV drips and hangover cures before breakfast.
For Doménique Wissink, this level of excess is just another week at work.
The 26-year-old founder of Extra Ibiza travel agency arranges high-end getaways and daytrips for the 1% – from Premier League footballers and reality stars to influencers, politicians and Hollywood A-listers.
Most of his bookings centre on Ibiza, Mallorca and Dubai, but if a client calls requesting a helicopter ride in Switzerland, he can source one within ten minutes. (Miami, he says, takes half an hour.)
In four years of planning holidays for the rich and famous, Dutch-born Doménique has seen it all.
‘We had a group flying into Ibiza who had spent tens of thousands on a beautiful villa in rural nature,’ he recalls.
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‘The plan was daily massages, healthy food and relaxation. But when they landed, they felt more like partying. So they booked eight five-star hotel rooms instead – and left the villa empty.’
He’s fielded every request imaginable: little people hired as waiters and bodyguards (which he did not provide); a client offering €200 for someone to dash out and buy forgotten toothpaste; a guest flown onto a superyacht purely to snap a champagne-soaked photo at lunch on deck before choppering off an hour later.
Some order 500 bottles of expensive champagne for a group of ten. Others request in-villa cryotherapy chambers or tattoo artists. One asked Doménique to provide €100,000 in bills – a request he legally had to refuse.
‘The ultra-high-net-worth will book club tables costing between €20,000 and €100,000 for day, evening and night,’ he says over Zoom from his home in Malaga. ‘And then decide on the day whether they actually want them. They’re not fussed about losing their 50% deposit.’
Some clients want carbon-copies of holidays they’ve seen on TikTok and Instagram – the same flowers, the same restaurants, even the same swings hanging from the side of a yacht. Others, particularly tech billionaires, demand meticulous itineraries.
‘They want everything planned – when they have their first beer, what they eat, how healthy it is. They calculate exactly how drunk they can get while still feeling good the next day. They find peace of mind in structure,’ he says.
Privacy is paramount for most. Yet there are also B-list celebrities who request camera crews to follow them around, documenting their indulgences for their followers.
And then there are the rich teenagers and emerging young sports stars, sent off on their first solo holidays with parents ready at the end of a phone to authorise €80,000 for a nightclub table at a moment’s notice.
Doménique insists most of his clients are polite and hard-working, but he has witnessed staggering waste – the kind of spending that could change lives elsewhere.
He has seen a client spend enough money in one night to pay one of his workers’ salaries for a year, and villas trashed after wild parties.
‘It bugs me when people smash windows, rip curtains down and just leave,’ he says.
Which is why he trusts his instincts when taking bookings. Some properties, he explains, need to be ‘hufter-proof’ – a Dutch term loosely translating to ‘arsehole-proof.’ Beautiful villas, but with replaceable Ikea furniture and fake grass instead of pristine lawns. Because, as he puts it, ‘we’ve seen the craziest things. People will literally drive their cars over the garden.’ Nothing shocks him anymore.
Doménique relies on psychological profiling to match clients with their dream holiday, promising them ‘experiences they didn’t even know they wanted’, he says. But just because something is requested, he doesn’t necessarily deliver – ‘shopping lists of drugs’, for example.
‘I don’t want to be an operator of their darkest needs. We get requests to bring women in, and we don’t support that. And we don’t manage drugs.
‘Aside from that, we’ll do almost anything – from booking a famous DJ for a villa’s basement nightclub, to rehoming a stray cat an influencer befriended and didn’t want to leave behind.’
One guest rented an entire villa for his birthday, but had no local friends to invite, so Doménique sourced – and vetted – the party guests.
Despite orchestrating hedonism for a living, Doménique’s own relationship with excess has been complicated. He started drinking and smoking weed at 14, got sober by 17, started using again at university and spent years as what he describes as a ‘functioning addict.’
‘I had a good time. But underlying addiction, there are always mental problems. When Covid hit, things got really bad. I was working on my own, and it was a slippery slope. I lost myself.
‘I wouldn’t drink during the day; I was sober for meetings and work. Then at six o’clock it was wine and beer, and then uppers until the early hours,’ he remembers.
Until 2023, when his girlfriend of nine years and Extra Ibiza co-founder, Jiel, told him she was leaving him ‘because there was no joy anymore’.
‘She said I was never there – always away, or working, or tired, or drunk. And I would be physically ill – like a constant state of having the flu. I knew I had to stop. I was in a parking lot somewhere when I just decided to quit.’
Jiel left, but 24 hours later, the pair were both made redundant from their jobs in marketing – and they had a decision to make. Living in Switzerland at the time, they chose to give it another go and move to Spain so Doménique could get sober. With just three suitcases full of possessions, they left everything else behind and spent months on the beach, recovering and rebuilding their broken relationship.
‘At that point, I found life was worth living again. We had the sunshine in our lives, were getting joy out of life, finding healthy friends and healthy food. When our money ran out, we had to do something to get back on our feet, so together we came up with the idea for Extra Ibiza and set it up’, he says.
The couple are now planning to move to Ibiza, and Doménique says it is easy to stay sober there; both his NA and AA sponsors live on the island, and despite its party isle image, it also promotes clean living.
(Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
‘I was enjoying myself by destroying myself,’ he says. ‘So I understand the joy in that lifestyle, which helps me understand my clients. I want people, and my staff, to be safe. Sometimes I have to tell a guest, maybe slow down tonight.’
It isn’t only the ultra-wealthy who book through him. He also arranges group trips for what he calls the ‘hard-working class’ – builders, carpenters and lorry drivers who club together to spend €40,000 on a week in the sun.
‘They work incredibly hard and save for it. And they’re just excited. I love chatting with them because they’re so humble,’ he says.
For all the glamour, Doménique’s own days are less champagne and more computer screen. He starts work at 6am and often answers WhatsApp calls until one in the morning. He isn’t interested in designer clothes, doesn’t collect luxury watches and doesn’t own a flashy car, though he admits to enjoying the occasional Michelin-starred freebie meal – a perk of the job.
‘I never did this for the money,’ he adds. ‘Something about it is pure. It’s creative. It gives me energy. It’s fun and I love it.’