Luxury travel has always been about more than five-star hotels and postcard-perfect destinations. Increasingly, it’s about the seamlessness of the journey itself—the way each moment flows into the next, creating experiences that feel both inevitable and unforgettable. Few people understand that better than Julie Hunter, co-founder and COO of HunterMoss (formerly Ultimate Driving Tours).
For more than a decade, Hunter has been mapping Europe’s most storied roads, pairing them with boutique stays, exceptional dining, and the thrill of driving some of the world’s most coveted cars. But what sets her apart is not just the itineraries—it’s the philosophy behind them. She has worked to redefine a space often dominated by bravado, building a brand that emphasizes inclusivity, anticipation, and connection.
As HunterMoss expands its footprint beyond Europe and into the U.S., Hunter is focused on curating journeys that go beyond horsepower and high-thread-count sheets. Her goal is to create what she calls “frictionless, anticipatory luxury”—experiences that don’t just impress but resonate. For Worth, she reflects on leadership, culture, and what “Worth Beyond Wealth” means when your business is built on delivering memories that last a lifetime.
You’ve driven more than 100,000 kilometers across Europe’s most iconic roads. How has that firsthand experience shaped the way you curate luxury driving tours for your clients?
We’ve spent years mapping and cataloguing not just roads across Europe, but the hotels, restaurants, cafes and scenic stops that link the roads together.
Many years and kilometers have taught me it’s the overall experience that is most important, not just a beautiful road, but anticipating exactly when guests will need a break and to stretch their legs and pairing that need with a beautiful stop that will be memorable.
Understanding the nuances of the road networks—the rhythm, the scenery, the local culture—allows me to design tours that are not just about beautiful cars and roads but about creating a narrative that resonates with each traveller. This depth of experience ensures that every journey is meticulously curated, offering a seamless blend of adventure and unforgettable memories and stories for our guests.
What does female leadership look like to you—particularly in the male-dominated world of high-performance automotive travel?
For me, personally—and I’m not sure if I would say it’s as a female or just my thought in general—good leadership is about empathy and empowerment. My goal is to equip my team with the resources they need to excel in their role and to support them in overcoming challenges and in growing and evolving their skills and capabilities. I encourage and want our team to challenge everything that we do and to find better ways and never to say they do something because that’s the way it’s always been done.
As a small business we’re constantly learning and improving on everything we do year on year, and from the beginning to the end of each event season, I want the team to be striving for those tiny incremental improvements to do better in each of our individual roles, and as a business overall, with the ultimate goal to deliver a better experience to our guests and to surprise them each time they return. We have a large number of repeat guests, and the best feedback we can receive is someone saying that they thought it was the best experience possible last time, but this journey beat that.
Supercar culture often gets branded as a boys’ club. How have you worked to challenge and evolve that perception through your role at Ultimate Driving Tours (HunterMoss)?
For over a decade we’ve been working to shift the space in which we operate. We do not view our business or experiences as “rallies” which are often seen as “boy’s trips” to drive hard and fast. We are a luxury adventure tour operator who specialises in the driving niche, and our experiences bring together a community of travellers who are looking for something exciting that incorporate the finer things in life. This community is fairly evenly gendered with the majority of our guests being couples, and increasingly also solo female travellers. Our goal is to foster a supportive and inclusive space for people to enjoy beautiful vehicles on the roads for which they were built, as part of an all encompassing luxury journey.
You’ve helped scale a multimillion-dollar luxury travel business. What are the key ingredients to growing an experiential brand in a post-pandemic economy?
As a travel business, the pandemic was incredibly challenging; however, for the first time in the business’ history, we also had a moment to pause, take stock of where we were and where we wanted to be and to plan more strategically on the direction we were going to take the business as we moved out of the pandemic.
Often as a small business owner, you are so ‘in’ the business, you don’t have the capacity to work ‘on’ the business, and the blessing in disguise that came out of an incredibly difficult couple of years was that opportunity. We have continued this strategic and intentional growth and evolution of the business since that time and I think that being strategic and intentional are two incredibly important ingredients in growing an experiential brand.
We now know exactly who our guest base is, and who it is not, we have a plan on how to reach our audience, how best to work with our guests on their journey from the very beginning of the marketing phase to the very end of their post-journey experience, and how to deliver what they are looking for on the ground. That being said, we strive to be adaptive and innovative based on ongoing guest feedback and internal learning, so our brand will continue to grow and evolve with the wants and needs of our guest-base.
How are customer expectations changing in the luxury travel sector—and how are you adapting your offerings to meet them?
We find luxury as a term in general is overused, there is luxury everything nowadays. It is becoming more and more challenging to impress discerning travellers—they’ve been to beautiful destinations and hotels, eaten at beautiful restaurants, driven special cars. What we find is essential is weaving the entire journey together into a seamless experience that delivers exactly what our guests would have wished for, without them having to say a word. We learn about each individual guest to tailor their experience to them—their likes, dislikes, tastes and preferences—so that we can anticipate their wants and needs without them needing to make a decision. In a busy, information and decision overloaded world, to us, luxury is frictionless and anticipatory, truly allowing guests to switch off and unwind but giving them exactly what they wanted in their travel experience.
With so many industries turning toward automation and remote access, what do you think is driving the growing demand for high-touch, high-speed, in-person experiences?
Core to the human experience is connection and community. In an increasingly remote and technologically driven world, travel is one of the rare opportunities we have to disconnect in order to connect. It also allows us to have all of our senses immersed—new sights, sounds, smells, tastes and more, which is something special that cannot be achieved remotely and through technology. As an experience provider, we aim to ensure everything our guests need to switch off is provided, beyond taking photos and videos, we encourage our guests to disconnect and embrace the inevitable bubble and micro community that forms within each small-group that we host. In this space, the rest of the world seems lightyears away and our guests—often couples or friends—can genuinely spend time and connect or re-connect with one another, creating core memories along the way. It’s quite special to be part of something that can facilitate this.
What markets or experiences do you see as the next frontier for ultra-luxury travel? Are there new destinations or formats you’re excited about for 2025 and beyond?
We’re always looking to take our guests to destinations beyond the familiar and to avoid those which we see as overvisited. For example, I love Franciacorta as a region in Italy. Franciacorta is a beautiful wine region about two hours east of Milan, close to Lake Iseo and Lake Garda. I love hosting guests in this region as it delivers everything we look for in an experience—special accommodation, very scenic, excellent food and wine, and an array of driving and non-driving based experiences, yet few international visitors have heard of, let alone been to, this region.
We have also recently launched a new winter driving program which incorporates a fleet of super-SUVs (so the SUV models of all the best luxury car manufacturers) on incredible alpine roads throughout the Bavarian and Austrian Alps. Few guests will have had the opportunity to experience all the latest and greatest SUV offerings from the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bentley and more, back-to-back on the roads for which they were built, yet many of our guests are luxury SUV owners. Balanced with stunning properties, winter wonderland scenery, incredible spa and skiing opportunities, and the possibility to add a little ice driving experience if they wish, we see this as the next big event on our calendar.
Tell us about a moment on the road—either behind the wheel or behind the scenes—that fundamentally changed how you think about leadership.
It’s hard to think of a specific moment that has changed the way I think about leadership. I think leadership is a journey, and as a leader I’m constantly learning and I hope the leader I am tomorrow or a year from now is significantly better than the leader I am now. As a detailed person, and definitely an overthinker—and in the same way as I do with each event—my thoughts often include how I could have dealt with something better or done better—whether big or small, how I can better support my team, and provide them with the support they individually need.
The team side of our business is fundamental to the guest experience and the success of what we do. And what we do is incredibly complex, so we inevitably ask a lot of our team and require that they are constantly and continually working to do better. That’s a lot for a business to ask. And with a business that is growing and changing so quickly, it’s easy to miss celebrating the little wins as much as the big wins, and to develop our team with intention. For me, a big part of growing the business has been focusing on the culture we want to create internally and working with our team to understand what they want and need, rather than telling them what they need and will be given. Of course, not everything is possible, but working alongside and inclusively we can aim to achieve as much as possible together.
Your work blends logistics, design, and adrenaline. What’s your approach to maintaining operational excellence while still delivering moments of pure joy?
When your role is to create and curate extraordinary experiences for well-travelled and discerning guests, attention to detail is key. As we plan, organise and execute an event we have thought through, discussed and dissected every moment of a journey, back to front, top to bottom, and everywhere in between. We plan journeys thinking about what our guests might be thinking or feeling at any given time—what will they want and need—and then translate that into a piece of the overall jigsaw puzzle that is the experience.
We have long and incredibly detailed logistics and run sheets, so our whole team knows at any given moment what is meant to take place, because the biggest challenge of what we do is that it’s a live experience. As soon as we introduce guests and commence the circus that is a multi-day, multi-guest, multi-team, multi-partner journey, whatever we plan ahead on paper can change in an instant and by being incredibly well organised, we have the mental and physical capacity to react to a constantly changing environment. And of course, flexibility and adaptability and being solution-oriented is key.
What does Worth Beyond Wealth mean to you—and how do you see that idea reflected in your life and your business?
Worth Beyond Wealth encapsulates the belief that true value lies beyond that which is monetary, or perhaps to be more abstract, that which is tangible. The concept of ‘money can’t buy’ is at the core of our businesses and experiences, and while of course some may argue that ‘money can buy you everything’, what it can’t buy is the unique connections, memories and experiences that take place on each journey. For us, no small-group or self-guided journey is the same—even when it’s the same event we’ve hosted before, because each is unique to the individuals we are hosting.
Our business seeks to offer more than luxury, it’s about creating moments that enrich lives, foster connections and leave lasting impressions. To be part of this and to curate this is something very special to me, and seeing and sharing in these moments and connections is the thing that keeps our team going during the hard moments or tough days.
