Founded in 2016 and holding the Luxury Lifestyle Awards’ world title since 2024, Haute Retreats’ answer runs from Tuscany to the Riviera: standards over scale, households that run themselves — and eight in ten families who come back.
It is the rarest kind of title — the kind that gets defended. In an industry where “world’s best” changes hands almost annually, the Luxury Lifestyle Awards have now handed their global villa-rental crown to the same company three years running: Haute Retreats, founded in 2016 by Sabrina Piccinin, was recognised as Best Luxury Villa Rental and Accommodation Service in the World in 2024 and 2025, and holds the awards’ ultra-luxury villa rental and concierge services distinction for 2026.
Which raises the obvious question — the one worth answering properly. How does a villa company stay on top for three straight years, in a market this crowded, without becoming the biggest player in it?
The answer begins three weeks before arrival
The first part of the answer is invisible to the guest, which is rather the point. A Haute Retreats stay does not begin at the villa gate; it begins twenty-one days earlier, when the household brief is written who is coming, who eats what, which child naps when, which grandparent takes the ground floor.
The house itself is walked and briefed before arrival, the provisioning is done, the fridge is full and the plan is set. By the time the family lands, in the company’s own phrase, the house already knows.
It can afford that ritual because of what it refuses to do: list at scale. Every one of its 2,400+ estates across 83+ destinations is hand-selected — walked, vetted and briefed by the company rather than uploaded by an owner. Photographs age quickly in this business; a walked house does not.
Staff is the baseline, not the upgrade
The second part of the answer is staffing philosophy. Where much of the market still sells a private chef or a villa manager as the indulgent extra, Haute Retreats treats the full household — chef, housekeeping, villa manager — as the baseline for larger groups.
It is a standard the company set early and the industry has since drifted towards, particularly as multigenerational travel has become the defining format of high-end holidays: three generations under one roof need a household that runs itself, not a checklist of optional add-ons.
One concierge, zero logistics
Then there is the structure of the stay itself. Rather than a booking platform on one side and a scramble of local suppliers on the other, a single concierge runs each stay end to end — the pre-arrival provisioning, the drivers, the boat day, the restaurant tables, the birthday cake that appears without anyone having asked twice.
The company describes the model as a private travel atelier, and the phrase is precise: the product is not the house, and not the boat, but the continuity between them. The guest’s only job is to be on holiday.
The loyalty economy
All of which would read as marketing if the numbers behaved differently. They do not. Eight in ten guest families return — a retention figure most travel brands would not print — and the company holds a 5.0 rating on Trustpilot. In an era when travel brands have chased volume, venture capital and the word “platform,” Haute Retreats has been recognised for the opposite instinct: growing the standard rather than the inventory, and letting the returning guest list do the compounding.
“Three years in a row belongs to two groups of people: the teams inside every villa, and the families who come back to them,” said Piccinin. “We have never wanted to be the biggest name in villa rentals — only the standard. When eight in ten families return, that is the award behind the award.”
A map that keeps widening
For European travellers, the third answer is geography — handled with the same restraint. The firm’s own booking data, published as the Billionaire Villa Index, ranks Tuscany the world’s most-requested villa market, with its Lake Como villas and the Amalfi Coast completing the top four or average stays now stretching past ten days as the families anchor in one estate or build the holiday around it.
This summer the company launched a curated French Riviera collection spanning St Tropez, Cap Ferrat and Cannes, uniting villa, yacht charter and private aviation on one coastline for the first time in its history — a new coast, added only once it could be delivered to the house standard.
The credentials have kept pace — a 2026 Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice nomination, ASTA accreditation but the honest answer to the question in the headline is less glamorous than any of them.
A villa company stays the world’s best for three straight years by doing the same unphotogenic things, every stay, in the same order: walk the house, write the brief, staff the household, hand one person the logistics and then do it again next year, for the same families, slightly better. The third title is simply what that looks like from the outside.
Haute Retreats offers luxury villa rentals, mansions for rent and private concierge service across 83+ destinations. ASTA-accredited; 2026 Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Nominee. hauteretreats.com.
