Before a single guest arrives, someone has already walked the villa. They’ve checked the linens and briefed the chef on dietary notes. They have informed the housekeeper on the family’s daily patterns and they have let the villa manager know that the toddler, for instance, can’t sleep without a night-light. It’s a ritual repeated thousands of times a year across dozens of countries, and it’s earned Haute Retreats the Luxury Lifestyle Awards’ top villa rental title for the third consecutive year.
Haute Retreats, the luxury villa rental and private concierge company, was founded in 2016 by Sabrina Piccinin. The company’s Luxury Lifestyle honors have shape shifted slightly year to year. In 2024 and 2025, Haute Retreats topped the awards’ “Best Luxury Villa Rental and Accommodation Service in the World” category; in 2026, it took the top spot in the awards’ newly framed ultra-luxury villa rental and concierge services category. Either way, it’s a very nice streak in an industry that’s increasingly dominated by search-and-book platforms, and it’s built on a model that runs almost entirely against that grain.
An Anti-Platform Approach to Villa Rentals
Haute Retreats now represents more than 2,400 fully staffed estates across 83-plus destinations. Its portfolio, notably, isn’t assembled through algorithms or open listings. Every property is hand-selected, then physically walked and briefed ahead of each arrival. For larger groups, a private chef, housekeeping and a dedicated villa manager come standard. And running through every stay, start to finish, is a single point of contact, one private villa concierge who owns the trip from first inquiry to final check-out. Piccinin calls the whole operation a private travel atelier. It’s a description that leans on awareness and attentiveness.
It shows up in the numbers Haute Retreats holds itself to. Eight in ten guest families return, and the company carries a 5.0 rating on Trustpilot, figures that read like a report card the brand assigns itself.
“Three years in a row belongs to two groups of people: the teams inside every villa, and the families who come back to them,” says Piccinin.
That return-guest rate, she adds, matters more to her than the trophy itself: “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.”
Where the Demand Is Heading
The 2026 win arrives alongside expansion. Haute Retreats has launched a new French Riviera collection spanning St Tropez, Cap Ferrat and Cannes. It’s a bet on the Riviera’s enduring pull for guests who want beach-club proximity without giving up staffed-villa privacy.
Meanwhile, the company’s own Billionaire Villa Index (its internal read on where its highest-spending clientele is actually booking) puts Tuscany, Turks & Caicos and Lake Como at the top of the world’s most-requested villa markets. For a company already deep in Italian villas, that Tuscany-and-Como pairing is a confirmation of where its business has been concentrated for years.
The recognition is stacking up elsewhere too: Haute Retreats is a 2026 Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice nominee and holds ASTA accreditation, the kind of credentialing that matters more to seasoned travel advisors than to first time villa renters; but it matters plenty to both.
The Standard, Not the Size
What’s notable about Haute Retreats’ approach is what it deliberately has not scaled. Theirs is a category where growth usually means more listings, wider search filters, and less human contact. Yet, Haute Retreats has scaled the opposite way: more staff per stay, more oversight per property, one person accountable for the whole trip rather than a rotating cast of booking-platform support tickets.
Three consecutive years of the same top honor suggests that bet is paying off. So does the fact that most of these families aren’t first-time guests at all; they’re the ones coming back.
Photos courtesy of Haute Retreats
