Doug Gollan

My name is Doug Gollan. For over 30 years I have been involved in media, first travel related, and for the past 16 years focused on Ultra High Net Worth (UHNW) consumers and private aviation.

Currently:

I am Founder and Editor-in-Chief of DG Amazing Experiences (DGAE), a weekly CEO-style travel and lifestyle e-newsletter reaching over 25,000 full and fractional private jet owners and C-Level executives at companies that operate private jets.

Launched in December 2015, the newsletter has generated a loyal readership of UHNW/Super Rich consumers who get it right on their smartphones, meaning we reach them wherever they are from and wherever they happen to be. The unique style and delivery run counter to traditional perceptions about digital marketing, however, it has been very successful with open rates averaging 20%. Case studies have shown a high level of recall (as high as 79 percent), and that after reading our articles, there is a large increase in awareness and intent to purchase.

In May 2017, I launched Private Jet Card Comparisons. It is the only independent buyer's card to jet card programs, comparing over 250 offerings by 65 variables. The website enables paid subscribers to save time and money by finding the jet cards that best fill their needs.

Previously:

Travel Agent Magazine

In the 1980s I cut my teeth covering the airline industry for Travel Agent Magazine. In my early 20s I was interviewing CEOs of the world’s largest airlines as they waged fierce battles for business supremacy. I had sit down interviews with industry legends such as Robert Crandall, Frank Lorenzo and the late Colin Marshall. General news reporting also gave me access to the top executives of global hotel companies and cruise lines. Needless to say, it was an educational experience.

From there I got into the sales side of magazine publishing and eventually worked my way up to management. I was part of the team that took Travel Agent from seventh in market share in our category to one of the Top 10 magazines in the world five years in a row, ranked by ad pages by Advertising Age Magazine. We also won numerous awards for excellence from Folio:, HSMAI and other industry groups.

We also started supplier correspondence course training (Disney, British Airways, Princess Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Jamaica, etc.) for travel agents, first by inserts in the magazine, direct mail and then online. Previously training meant having a supplier come to a travel agency office or having travel agents go to an off-site meeting, both expensive and time-consuming.

Elite Traveler, the private jet lifestyle magazine

In 2001 I co-founded Elite Traveler. We were ahead of the curve, pioneering short-form editorial in the luxury lifestyle magazine category. We did things no other consumer magazine had done before. Instead of 800 numbers and websites, we gave our readers email addresses and phone numbers of actual people as the call to action for our articles.

We realized that despite the stereotypes of the Super Rich, they were actually very diverse in their interests and backgrounds. We developed an award-winning editorial package that appealed to the broadest possible portion of the global UHNW audience, from rappers and sports stars to royalty, the CEOs of global companies, owners of some of the world’s largest privately held businesses and their families. We also understood that for a significant part of our readership (and some of the biggest consumers of luxury) English probably wasn’t their mother language.

We understood that these very rich readers probably already had favorite magazines (often industry trade magazines) so we had to give them something different both in content and presentation. We featured pictorials of the inside of top suites (something never done before as a regular feature) giving detailed information, including the General Manager contacts. We used our oversize format to entice readers with pictures of luxury goods and services arranged by various themes with just enough information about the products we featured to answer basic questions and hopefully gain their interest.

It worked!

In survey after survey of private jet and fractional jet owners, 90% said they were regular readers, 95% said Elite Traveler was higher quality than other magazines they read, over 90% purchases products and services they read about in Elite Traveler and about 70% said we were one of their 3 or 4 favorite magazines. With an editorial product and format that generated appeal with this diverse audience, Elite Traveler became the first and only magazine claiming majority private jet distribution to be successfully audited without interruption by BPA or any other audit bureau. The audit is the key to assuring advertisers the publisher is actually printing and distributing the magazine as claimed, so the fact that nobody has been able to replicate our worldwide distribution to private jets (despite multiple attempts) makes me particularly proud.

My expertise on the UHNW/Super Rich market

In launching Elite Traveler, I was surprised at the dearth of research about the Ultra High Net Worth segment, a group that is typically defined by having a net worth of at least $30 million. By good fortune, I met Russ Alan Prince, who at the time was a columnist writing about the Super Rich for Institutional Investor and had also authored several dozen books advising lawyers and financial advisors for UHNWs. Together we partnered for one of the first studies that looked at consumer spending by these wealthy families. The results of over 600 interviews with private jet owners was published in 2007 in “The Sky’s the Limit: Marketing to the New Jet Set.”

With R.A. Prince & Associates we completed nearly a dozen various research projects. I also am a vociferous consumer of any research on the affluent and rich I can find. Virtually always research that is billed as being about Super Rich consumers is mainly conducted with Mass Affluent participants (Household Income under $400,000).

Contact me at douggollan@aol.com.