Liberty Has Been to Antarctica - Now She's Planning Your Next Trip
Introducing Liberty Barrons, Senior Curator at Sarah Casewit’s Otherworldly Travel.
There is a type of travel professional who looks at a client's wish list and immediately identifies the gap between what they asked for and what they actually need. Liberty is that person. The qualification is not a certification or a hotel partnership ranking. It is a biography: a French degree that ended in Guadeloupe, a solo route with no fixed bookings running from Colombia through Antarctica and across to the Philippines, and years spent in the field building the kind of institutional knowledge that no press trip produces.
You grew up traveling. When did it stop being something your parents organized and become something you owned?
The turning point was Guadeloupe. My degree required a year living in a French-speaking country and I chose an island in the Caribbean rather than Paris or Brussels, which might tell you something. Living there was the first time travel required more from me than observation. I came back changed in a way that a holiday never managed. After university, I went straight into luxury travel and never seriously considered anything else.
If you could reset one journey and do it again from scratch, what would it be?
The solo backpacking route. Colombia first, then Ecuador and out to the Galápagos Islands. Peru, Bolivia, south through Chile into Patagonia, one of the most visually arresting landscapes I have ever encountered. Then Antarctica. Back north through Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and across to Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines. No bookings. No fixed plan. The result was meeting an extraordinary mix of people: travelers, locals, people who became lifelong friends. There is a particular freedom in that kind of travel that is very difficult to recreate deliberately. I have not stopped trying.
The most underrated destination you have sent a client to?
Swedish Lapland in winter. People think they know what to expect from photographs. They do not. Nothing prepares you for the specific shade of pastel pink the sky turns at sunset against white snow, or the absolute silence of standing on a frozen lake while waiting for the Aurora to appear. And then you check into somewhere like Arctic Bath, which floats on the river, or one of the mirrored cabins suspended in a pine forest, and you realize the architecture is competing with the landscape rather than yielding to it. Swedish Lapland has to be physically felt. A screen does nothing for it.
What do most clients get wrong?
They arrive with a property in mind. Something found on social media, and often it genuinely is beautiful. But highly visible hotels tend toward exactly the problems you would expect: substandard service at volume, an overcrowded atmosphere that no amount of design can fix. The properties I am most proud of recommending are almost always ones a client would never have found independently. That gap between what is visible and what is actually excellent is where this work lives. Closing that gap is the job.
What does a great travel day look like for you?
Both kinds. The slow mornings with no alarm and a breakfast view worth the airfare. And the days that push you somewhere beyond comfort: a helicopter over Victoria Falls in Zambia, being invited to a local funeral in Varanasi, the first steps onto the Great Wall of China, diving with bull sharks in Fiji, experiencing minus thirty degrees Celsius for the first time in northern Finland. The relaxed days exist to recover from the ones that take years to fully absorb. One without the other is just tourism.
Three destinations that defined your career?
Cook Islands. Antarctica. The Maldives.
Three still on the list?
Svalbard, for polar bears. Kenya, for the wildebeest migration. Tonga, to swim with humpback whales. All wildlife. All non-negotiable.
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