Travel tales: James Kennedy

James Kennedy, Managing Director and CEO of Melbourne-based luxury watch retailer Kennedy Watches & Jewellery is obviously familiar with world time watches.

But the globetrotting Kennedy may as well have his own personal timezone – one that follows him around Europe and to the USA, including a ritual pilgrimage to the annual Watches and Wonders show in Geneva.

Leading a family business founded in 1976 which now boasts ten signature boutiques across Australia, Kennedy took some time out to share his views on travel with Executive Traveller.

What makes a great airline?

I’ve flown a lot of different airlines, to always try and see which ones are better than others.

On key things like service – whether it’s Emirates, Qatar, Etihad, Singapore Airlines – they’re all very, very good across the board.

The key thing where an airline can fall away is if they don’t maintain the quality of their cabins. Once an aircraft gets too old or hasn’t been refurbished, it starts to lose that highly qualitative feel.

I’m a big fan of Emirates. On recent trips, Emirates has had great service, great food, great cabins, and it's great stopping in Dubai. I don’t think I could ever do the 18-hour direct flights from Perth (to Europe), it’s 24 hours end-to-end from Melbourne to Europe.

Kennedy regularly flies Emirates' first class to Europe.

I far prefer flying 13 hours, getting off the plane, going for a massage or just relaxing in the lounge for a couple of hours before I get onto my next flight.

And that next flight’s pretty good because it’s only six or seven hours from Dubai to Europe, so you’re sort of already there and in the time zone.

Non-stop from Melbourne to New York? It depends on the quality of the plane before I decide whether I'm going to sit on one for 18 or 20 hours, and I don’t want to be the first to try it!

On the joys of switching off…

When you’re sitting on a beautiful beach in the south of France, you shouldn’t be Googling and Instagramming and whatever else on your phone.

You should be sitting there, enjoying the weather, the sun, the water, that special time with your family.

For my son, we actually try pretty hard to limit ‘technology time’ for lack of a better term, and when we travel he loves to go to the park, go on the carousel rides and on the boats – he loves to experience things.

And I think that’s the essence of travel. If anything, I would argue that travel is the disconnect that you need not only from your everyday life but from that technological vortex that you are sort of sucked into on a daily basis, and I guess recalibrating your work-life balance.

It's important to take time to switch off, Kennedy says.

One of my favourite parts of a trip is when you get on the plane and take off – for me, that’s the start of it all – your mind is going ‘Okay, I’m switching off.’

You sit there in anticipation about what’s to come, what the trip’s going to hold, what are the things you’re going to do.

And unless there’s something major work-wise on, I don’t want to use the Internet on the plane. I  get to shut off from being contacted, from technology.

I actually used to travel with my Amazon Kindle but as I've gotten older, I’ve tended to go back more and more to books.

I like taking two or three books away with me, because I don’t get an opportunity to read much when I’m at home, but I get through a lot of books when I’m travelling.

And there’s a certain tactile appeal in holding the book. I love the paper, the smell of a new book.

Is that in any way similar to the difference between mechanical watches and digital smartwatches?

There’s certainly a weight, a volume, a scalability to a mechanical watch over a digital one.

And there’s the aesthetics, a sense of beauty. Beyond the materiality of mechanical watches, you obviously get into the mechanics: how they work, how they move, the beauty of design, and these types of things.

And in many cases with skeleton designs you can see the inside, so you actually get to see everything, from the exterior to the aesthetics of the structure and the movement.

With literally hundreds of watches at his fingertips, does Kennedy have any special watch that is his ‘go to’ for travelling?

I try to avoid anything flashy or ostentatious; nothing that’s too over the top or is going to draw too much attention. And I tend to look for a watch that’s versatile and a bit robust.

If I’ve got meetings, something I can wear it with a suit and it holds its own, but I can also wear it with my board shorts when jumping off the rocks in Capri into the ocean.

One of Kennedy's go-to watches for travelling is this versatile black-faced Rolex Deep Sea.

One of my big travel watches is a Rolex Deep Sea. It’s a very large, thick steel watch with a black face, it’s absolutely something you can wear with a suit and also when you jump into the ocean.

Rolex has done an incredible job in that diving and ocean area. They make an incredibly robust, strong sports watch, and I think they lead in that field.

Are there any particular horological museums Kennedy would recommend for lovers of watches?

There’s one I would always say people should see once in their life, and that’s the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva.

Some of the antique timepieces in Geneva's Patek Philippe Museum.

It’s incredible. It holds hundreds of years of history, not just what Patek Philippe have made over time but movements going all the way back. Even if you’re not a watch person or a horological aficionado, I still think that’s something to see.

As much time as Kennedy spends in Switzerland, his favourite destinations are two very different places – Italy and Queensland – because they have something special in common…

Geneva’s a beautiful city. It’s a little bit like Melbourne in the sense when you have a sunny blue- sky day, it’s an incredible looking city.

But for me and my family, we love Italy, and particularly the diversity of the country.

You go to Milan, Sardinia, Sicily, Bologna, Capri, they’re all so different to one another. All the way from the north down to south, there’s so much beauty and diversity in this one country.

I think we share a little bit of that here in Australia, particularly in Queensland compared to other parts of Australia.

You’ve got so much there: the Whitsundays, Cairns, Noosa, the Gold Coast, and it’s so great for kids as well.

There are other beautiful parts of Australia that I love travelling to as well, even just driving down to the Mornington Peninsula for a weekend or a long weekend if we can.

But being a parent now, you have to recalibrate your style of travel… as much as my wife and I could love to just sit on a beach all day, I think that would drive my son crazy!