220. Julia Perowne

0:02This is a global production. There are still days when I struggle with that, so I kind of put on my armour. And my armour is my shoes and my dresses and I do my hair and I get up and I go out there because, yeah, I've chosen an industry that is very male-dominated and hard. It's a harsh industry as well. My husband went to tell his mum that I was pregnant. pregnant he said i've got some news she says is julia pregnant and he said how do you know she goes well everybody saw leah going into the pharmacy and buying 12 pregnancy tests and they live in the same village oh that's so you can imagine yeah i love that so brilliant can't keep a a secret in wells next to sea do you drink on planes yeah for sure nothing i love You're such a girl's girl.

0:55Yeah. But you know, all these people are like, I don't eat the airline food. I love, like, slightly dehydrated. Oh, I love airline food. Some kind of chicken and mashed potatoes. Honestly, any food I haven't had to buy and cook myself.

1:19it is my great pleasure to introduce my fellow traveler fellow podcaster fellow bon vivant the travel pr supremo entrepreneur businesswoman etc julia perone perone stupid name isn't it Perrone. You are in the hot seat. Julia Perrone is the founder and CEO of Perrone International, which is, and I'm reading from the press release, Julia, Jules, actually, a global communication sales and marketing consultancy with offices in London, Milan, New York and Mexico City. you've been in the trade business for 20 years and you have become the pr's pr haven't you you really are in terms of travel if not every other line thank you that is that i take that yes i mean that's amazing i mean i i hate the term pr for so many different reasons oh well it doesn't seem to say what we do anymore that's incredible because actually the first question i was going to ask is you know with credit to your brilliant company they sent me a bio and i literally didn't understand a word of it yeah it was all in jargon in simple terms what do you do we communicate honestly that is like the crux of what we do you have a brand in hospitality and we help you communicate it and actually more of that nowadays is dialing down the volume at time as dialing it up or giving advice or being a therapist to you know hoteliers that are a bit in a muddle it's managing crisis so it's like it's it's communications i find pr such an old-fashioned term because it's not you know and also everyone has an image of some sort of fluffy girl with blonde hair and a large engagement ring who's sort of wafting around drinking a glass of prosecco Yeah, fluffy, basically.

3:12And it isn't anymore. I mean, it's incredibly intense. It's mad. It's chaotic. Look at the world we're in right now. Travel is utter, utter chaos. I think it's all just trying to make sense of it and help people deliver their stories, basically. I'd like to say storytelling, but storytelling has become a sort of overused, annoying term, hasn't it? I think we should go to a kind of example of something you've done recently. You don't have to necessarily name the client. Right. So, you know, of an example of what your day is like. Yeah, yeah. Well, today is a classic example of like helping a client who really struggling with in Africa.

3:53A lot of American business has cancelled going to Africa in the last couple of months because of flying through the Middle East. Because that's how a lot of people are getting into Africa. um now ebola so the americans are very nervous about going there so that was this morning's trying to work out how we can sort of look at other markets the australians are traveling you know sort of it's just it's literally coming up with kind of strategies of how we can help them in their commercial strategies or how we can pivot our activity latin america is still traveling they don't care about what's going on in the middle east they don't care about ebola they're just like they're so used to kind of craziness on their shores um then i've had a couple of media meetings today i've just been talking to a hospitality investment company that is thinking about acquiring some new product and i gave my opinion on that which is to not do it because there is so much oversaturation and overdevelopment in certain places at the moment they were looking at an island in greece which is just kind of a disaster zone um they were looking to develop it to develop a property on an island in greece and there's just i'm sure you've seen it with like places like mykonos or ruined yeah corfu people queuing up like a line for a toilet to take the selfie with the sunset yeah totally then i went back to the office and i'm troubleshooting because somebody's booked something on booking.com and they're you know Like you can't, it's like any day is like a myriad of stuff that is because that's what it is.

5:24The world is in complete chaos at the moment. So, you know, but we just we do what we've got to do. Let's talk about that for a bit more before we go back to your childhood daughter of a Norfolk farmer. Just deeply in love with you, Rachel. It's always required here, Julia. the fact that you've also launched your own wine label cobble hill i mean you've got so many hats on all the time and i've spent time with you and you know full disclosure jules is a great friend and i've traveled the world with jules and she's never not working she's always on and like margaret thatcher she needs about three hours sleep and she's the last to leave the party she drinks the most i wasn't going to say that i'm fine to say that but why do you think i set up my own wine you drink hardest than anyone's you party hardier harder and you're up first you are a literal freak of nature um the travel industry at the moment what would you say the three biggest challenges are to hospitality and travel right now?

6:33So three biggest, obviously, is obvious, obviously geopolitical reasons and how that is impacting bookings. Everything is very last minute. So people are like, is it safe to go? I'm going to go on Friday. And these are big trips. People are booking epic family adventures and they're going with two days' notice. So yeah, it's just the name of the game now. Lastminute.com. It is more than ever before. But why? They're booking two years out. That's so mad. Because I think people are nervous. They're like, what is going on in the world? Is it safe? I'm going to go. Is it hot? I'm going to go. Is it too hot?

7:08I'm not going to go. And I think people are just feeling very, very nervous because of geopolitical reasons. I think people are feeling a lot poorer. And actually, even we're seeing it, the Americans this year are not, you know, they're more concerned about hotel pricing than they were before. they um the brits obviously are we're all feeling a hell of a lot poorer people are nervous they're sort of thinking maybe i'll keep my money rather than spend it at the moment um and then the second thing is just the cost i mean the really it's the cost of it all like cost of flying flights that used to be i mean you you can't get an economy flight to europe now for much under a grand so if you're a family of four or five yeah and flying to the states or something i mean that that's really impacting business a lot more than anything because obviously hotels have got expensive but the cost of actually traveling is just it's insane at the moment will the fact that we have a peace deal a memorandum of understanding you know currently with between iran and israel and the us will we see those air prices come down i don't think it's happening anytime soon i was um at the Financial Times conference a couple of weeks ago in Puglia and Martin Wolf who I love, he's like, I listen to him every day, I read what he says Chief Economist I think he is on the FT I know Martin, he's amazing he basically said the impact of the crisis in the Middle East isn't actually going to hit until really September, October, November because of course all the gas, the fuel and everything that we're getting now is what was coming through the Strait of Hummers before the crisis, so we're going to have this delayed effect impact of it these delayed effects and that is that's you know things like airline fuel it's it's so much of you know our supply chain is going to be impacted so i don't think this is going to change for quite a long time and also once prices go up they tend not to come down it's not like a sort of you know um natural reflex for the airlines to go oh yeah we're going to drop our prices again or hotels post covid to go we're going to drop our prices again they tend to keep them higher which is you know it's so i think yeah i think that's it and i do think what's going on in europe right now with this passport control is oh really a nightmare we have discussed this yeah you were panicking when you were in portugal the other day well i was stuck for three hours yeah and i mean i hear different things from different airports and different you know different countries yeah but i mean it's going to really impact summer travel what what are you hearing from the inside in all honesty you let's explain what it is it's called the european entry and exit system it means non-eu travelers have to give their um retinal and fingerprint and fill out a questionnaire every single fucking time every day leave yeah or leave or come into a EU country.

10:13And obviously that impacts us, the British, but it also impacts anyone outside of the EU. So if you come in behind a flight from America or you come in behind a big flight coming into, I don't know, Naples or Rome or Milan, I got slammed into Milan the other day, three and a half hours. Oh my God. It was horrendous. So, and it's just not working the system. I think it's supposed to take two and a half minutes per person, but most people don't know what they're doing. so they end up having to kind of go back to the questionnaire or the questionnaire hasn't registered them properly so actually it's more like five minutes per person and so if you've got a long queue your hours and you've got to do it on the way out which is why people have been missing their flights because when I was flying out of Milan it was an hour and a half to go through but most people sort of turn up an hour and a half before they go through they're doing a bit of shopping they don't actually realize that then in that passport control bit you have to do it again it's not just showing a passport anymore it's a proper thing again listen jules what i mean why isn't it a one and done system where they can you know do a facial scan get your retina and you just walk through you do a kind of schengen well i think it's supposed to be that but the issue is it's the people in front of you who haven't done it so it doesn't even matter if you've done it you're still held up by the people in front because if you've done it you do it over again i've i've been through france i've been through portugal i've been through italy i've done it every single time yeah no me too and so and actually when i was coming out of i can't remember where i was somewhere in italy the other day like it was quite stressful because they kept saying it hasn't registered you it hasn't registered you and i said i've been through europe now i've done 28 flights in three months for god's sake like they have my details but it just wasn't registering so it's so every single time you go through a new airport or any airport You have to do it when you enter and when you exit.

12:07Yeah. And so if you're a family this summer coming through an already busy airport and you've maybe got two kids, a shitload of stuff on you or whatever, you potentially might be in an airport for two or three hours. I think that's going to be the norm this summer. And are the airlines making any allowances for the fact that passengers are missing their flights for no real fault of their own? So I think like some of the airlines are getting in touch and saying you need to get to the airport early because this airport was particularly bad. I had an email from BA the other day. I'm right now. Just leave.

12:41Because they are just. But that, you know, their schedule is like so it's got to go within three seconds because they can't be on the tarmac for longer than X because then they'll get paid and then the whole system doesn't work. But, you know, it's it's it's really I'm much more worried about the departure than the entry because you kind of know you're going to get through eventually. it's going to be incredibly annoying but within a few hours you've got to make you might miss your flight home is this going to be in this i mean when i was in when i arrived at lisbon they had like two flights arrived hundreds of passengers everybody wanted to get in in through the system yeah uh there was a huge queue of brits non-eu the eu lane was empty so we all queued and they had about 20 of these machines to take your scans yeah three were working three yeah so if they did sort it out the tech side of it do you think it is eventually going to work it will eventually but you're still going to have a problem in that you're always going to be in a queue behind people who haven't done it so if they're being you know either you know clueless or moronic you're going to still have to wait until they've sorted themselves out so unless they're going to be able to somehow I'll fast track the people that have done it and are in the system.

13:58I think it's just painful. They must do that. They must do that. But you know what's interesting for me is I often do like a quick flight in a day. I'll go into Milan in the morning, have a meeting, come out in the afternoon, similarly somewhere else. You can't bet on doing that anymore. So you're really going to have to think through travel. It's going to destroy business travel, isn't it? Because I don't think you get it on the Eurostar. I think Eurostar is absolutely fine. No, I've done the Eurostar. It was fine. You had to do it.

14:29you've told everyone and this is just classic jules you've done 28 flights in the last three months what are your travel hacks come on i mean checking in luggage what do you keep i always always check luggage i i like do you always check the luggage in so no like two days i don't check yeah um but i if i'm anything over that i love i just love to take all my favorite things and when I travel. I know, I've seen it. You have, when you get to your hotel room, I call it the floor drobe because you put all the shoes. Lay them all out. I think my record was 17 pairs for a four day trip. I wore them all.

15:06I wore them all. I love a shoe change. You've got an incredible wardrobe. But what are your life hacks? Two days, you go to hand luggage. Hand luggage, yeah. So I have a few things because I do a lot of long haul traveling. so as soon as I get on a plane I change into like leggings comfortable so that I arrive at the other end having changed back into my clean clothes and I feel refreshed I have you know specific things that I love to travel with I am so antisocial you know the headphones I do not want to talk to anybody on a plane um and so it's straight on with like a really heavy duty moisturizer and my contact lenses come out.

15:47It's so unglamorous. Do you drink on planes? Yeah, for sure. Nothing I love more. You're such a girl's girl. Yeah, but you know all these people are like I don't eat the airline food. I love like slightly dehydrated. Oh, I love airline food. Some kind of chicken and mashed potatoes. Honestly, any food I haven't had to buy and cook myself. Jules, it's like, you know, you are, nothing seems to faze you. I've travelled with you. You deal with crises the whole time. do you think this is partly to do with your you had a real upbringing in norfolk you're a farmer's daughter what was it about your childhood that has equipped you to literally take on all these challenges i know that's a kind of really no a really kind of question but it's true you know you went to boarding school yeah very worked on the farm yeah i went to boarding school seven i yeah look my family that's quite young yeah i was young and i was by but i had only just turned seven as well because I'm an August baby.

16:44I have a very practical family. They have made their way. They're proper grafters. They were tenant farmers. They bought land, but they've done all of it on their own. You know, my dad is a tractor driving farmer. He's not a Range Rover driving farmer. He's on the tractor. He's fixing the irrigators. He's out there. And the reason I went to boarding school young is because we had sheep and looking after those in the spring. It was all night lambing my mother was doing the night shift my dad was doing the the daytime like we didn't have lots of money so it was like get on with it and um and be very practical my mother is very social extremely glamorous I've got this like hilarious like yin and yang parent situation um but I I think it's it's kind of stood me in good stead basically but I also like we didn't travel much when I was younger.

17:36We had an amazing upbringing, by the way, because it was on a farm. What were you farming? Sheep and what else? So we had sheep. We had, so it's big arable crops. Right. Lots. And then dad went big into onions. He's a really important onion farmer.

17:52And, but it, you know, our holidays were like, we had family in Switzerland, so we'd go out there a bit. But it was like, you'd drive out there through the night. You know, it wasn't glamorous travel. In fact, I still love going backwards on trains because I still feel like I'm going on holiday. You know, that was like going to Cambridge for the day from Norfolk. But I just, yeah, I think that I've just been brought up in a way that makes me very honest. I hope humble. I would hope that's something that people would say about me. I'm in a world that is so different from my Norfolk upbringing, but it's absolutely part of me.

18:31and it completely grounds me every day. And I have a little cottage in Norfolk now. The mouse house. The mouse house. And if I didn't go back there, I think I'd go completely insane because I go back there. No one gives a shit that I've been whizzing around the world, going to these fabulous places. We're in the pub. I was there on Friday. We're talking about potato prices going through the floor. What a nightmare it is for the community. No one's eating. Because of my jar. probably a massive Monjaro situation no one's drinking so that's vodka no one's eating crisps and potatoes I think just have really bad PR I love potatoes I can live on I remember when I went to Norfolk and I was like in your bit of the world and I won't say where it is but I was on the seafront and I thought oh I wonder if Jules is here so I ran you and you said yes I am and then I looked and I saw you on a mud flat with your mum and your little boy.

19:29And a bottle of wine. And a bottle of wine. And your son was like, you know, doing a slide. Naked, running in the mud. And I was like, I couldn't believe it. It was so funny. What were the chances that not only were you there, but you're actually about 400 yards in front of me. And of course, I could see you immediately because of your hair and you're like, you know, Ivo, like coming behind you in a tweed jacket. So you are for real, everyone. Jules is for real. Yeah. This Norfolk thing is really important to you. it's everything to me and I and I it's it's a yin and the yang in my personality but it's completely what saves me basically you are because here you are in in your beautiful you know floral dress heels always heels and I'm here looking like a teenage skater boy as usual because that's my look Rachel no always glam I love it no no no lot of school um so boarding school did you like boarding school um so i was very badly bullied when i was in prep school just one girl just decided um was it all girls no it was co-ed my brother actually weirdly went to different um prep school even though it was co-ed but i was very very little yeah and um it's very short and i think i was sort of just picked on by so mean i'm just showing you a news flash there's a travel flash which we'll get to oh travel yeah great um no it was hard it was definitely hard and the weird thing was i was only 25 minutes away from home hideously homesick but i could only go home three times a term and i used to this is tragic oh my god i would sit on the wall in the afternoons ticking off different colors of cars going past in the hope that i'd see somebody who knew me he might actually save me basically because I really was utterly miserable anyway I got through it I got through it through sport I'm I loved I was tennis captain and this that and the other hockey threw myself into that and then went off to um you know uh school again boarding which boarding school did you go to so I was at Gresham's prep school and then I was at Aundel I knew yeah I knew it was one of those yeah and Aundel was like you loved it I did it's hot you know it's a thousand plus people it's sink or swim it's it was hard we were girls that only just started going there so it was like I think in my year there were like 110 boys and there were like 10 girls so it was quite you know the boys would be walking back um from lessons in the morning and we'd have to go past the boys refractory which was sort of for four boys houses and in the summer they would just chuck binfuls of water over us so they could see our bras under our white shirts and there was quite a big girl in my year who was absolutely lovely and the names that they would call her they were just it was absolutely horrendous but it was just sort of allowed I mean I think they just call her the alien mothership and she got a it was like 200 boys shouting this at her as we walked past and then they would sort of judge how big your boobs were I mean it was sounds completely different now obviously did you hear about the what's it called something bugle you know when Marlborough when the girls arrived at Marlborough I can't remember what it's called but you know when the new girls would walk into the dining hall they would all rate them and shout out a number it's funny because there were four of us and we would find a different way to walk back that took us like a really long way around because I was in the middle of a town you go right round and come up through the hockey pitchers so you can avoid this Sorry, the crumpet trumpet, I think it was called.

23:07And I went, sorry. That's the crumpet trumpet. It's time for the crumpet trumpet. All the new girls would arrive and then walk in and they would call out a number. Horrifying. So go back to the slaughter buckets. So we would go this sort of long way around. But it's funny because I remember when I first moved to London, and even when I was at university, if you ever went past this sort of group of men, like whether it was at a building site or something, I would always be like, how can I go round? because I definitely had sort of a sense of like this tribe mentality who get together like a sort of, you know, herd of pack of wolves.

23:41So you have that kind of fight or flight response. Oh, yeah. Or, you know, that awful, you know, the body keeps a score. You go into a mode of they're going to do something. They're going to judge. They're going to judge me. Or throw a bucket of water at me. Throw a bucket of water. Did you ever have the water? I think I did once or twice. I mean, my brother at Aundel was the year above me. So he was actually, and he was very rugged, rugby player. So I think they gave me a bit of a... I was going to ask about him. He's in the army. Did he protect you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, he did completely. Well, you're lucky there because I had an older brother.

24:13And when I arrived at prep school, he pretended I didn't exist. So I was like, hi, and he'd literally walk past me in the corridor. I think there was an element of that too. I had some quite pretty friends, so I was quite useful to my brother. so there's two of you there's two of us and you've both done very well he's done very well he's in the army he is um very senior he's a lieutenant colonel i'm probably gonna get that wrong yes he's the lieutenant colonel he's traveling all over the world into um let's say um some pretty fruity places these days i don't think i can talk much more about it than that but he yeah he's done he's proper soldier you know he's um he's he's out there he's um he's doing an amazing job and he's got three boys who so you know that's hard army um dad his amazing wife they like how they manage their life we're i think we're just what do army wives how do army wives self-actualize you know what do they do can they be influencers i mean what is that what are options she's a teacher which I think is great because it gives you the holiday time and the rest of it but I mean it's like they're heroes let me tell you they are selfless heroes it's unbelievable because of course with the army it's like but if you move around a lot how can you be a teacher how can you like bed down into a school in one place for a while okay um so she can like yeah she can do that yeah yeah and you've got um a boy who's who's at prep school now yeah and he's in reception oh yeah can you talk about how that was a surprise because you'd never thought you'd be able to have kids oh yeah i was told when i was 18 i couldn't have babies um i had polycystic ovaries really badly it was really incredibly traumatic and then basically 20s 30s never thought I could have children um and so went kind of hell for leather with my career and friends used to say to me oh you know would you be a godmother and I'd say kids but of course it was like it was actually a kind of it was like a protective reaction to the fact that I was just pretty devastated and I would just be like it's I'm all about my career I'm a career woman but because I couldn't have kids that's what you've been told and you also had a big operation yes I did I had a stomach tumour removed in 2016 I had a big chunk of my stomach taken out I unexpectedly found that I had this tumour which had undoubtedly been caused through a very stressful business situation I was in because I truly believe that stress manifests itself in your stomach and that's interesting as do a lot of doctors although of course no one can prove that way I've got fat around my tummy because I'm stressed carry on Julia um the yeah it was like a total moment of like changed my life it was like a in what way did it change your life that um because I was in a very difficult business relationship with somebody who was very controlling and um I was you know whether it was every Sunday night or every evening it was I could feel it really stressing now and for me stress totally manifests itself in my tummy if I'm stressed I get an upset tummy or you know you get blocked up tummy and this but this had been going on for several years um and I was helping launch a medical spa ironically in Germany and one day this very beautiful doctor said to me and I was sort of in all these business meetings he said Jules every time I see you you do not look so good and I was like oh thanks cheers hot doctor and he said look before you fly back to London tonight can I just do a bit of an analysis on you and see what is going on this is the guy at Brenner's this is the Dr.

28:07Carnegie at Brenner's who I will say basically saved my life goodness who I've met who saved me from from the jellyfish bites but carry on yes exactly so he um I went to his uh surgery he's a very German take off your clothes i was like oh my god hot doctor um so i walked around the room you know and he said there's something wrong with your stomach he did not sound yep they found something within 25 minutes they're around barden barden having an mri scan and they find this thing in my stomach which was as big as a grapefruit and it was sort of sandwiched in my screen and my stomach I mean, now I look like when I look back at it, I was in a lot of discomfort.

28:50But I was in a relationship with somebody at the time who was a doctor who kept saying to be, oh, you've got irritable bowel. You travel too much. You drink too much. You're always on planes. Time zones. Of course you're going to have this issue. As it turned out, it was a much bigger issue. So I had a huge operation. I had this, you know, it was it was incredibly stressful. But actually, it was like a defining moment in my life. the surgeon came up to me and he said, I've taken out the tumor. You now have to take out what caused the tumor. And actually, interestingly, he said to me, he had more and more people coming to see him, like more and more people between the age of like 30 and 45, more young people who were coming in to him with major stomach tumors.

29:35So this is 10 years ago. This is before all the stuff we're now saying about, you know, stomach cancer and colon cancer and all the rest of it. he said they've all got one thing in common stress he said I can't prove it that stress causes this but there's got to be a connection between them there's undoubtedly and um I was in hospital for for a while and and actually came out of hospital and I asked for a corporate divorce from my business partner we liquidated a company we then set up on our own it was beyond stress but I I remember sitting in the Pret-a-Manger on the Farringdon Road, sobbing as I'd just signed the papers, which basically gave me my life back.

30:21I'd sold my flat, set up my first business. Everything was in my business. I've put every single thing in my life into my business, which obviously comes at a lot of personal costs, but I absolutely love what I do. And I recovered. And then I set up on my own. so this is 20 years ago so this is actually 10 years ago August the 1st 2016 I set up my company Perone and we haven't looked back I had 16 people there and then we're now 76

30:59the thing I'm most proud of is how we came through COVID and we were opening an office in New York on April the 1st 2020 I mean can you imagine we paid for the venue that's like a week after the lockdown yeah so I'd hired this team an expensive team you know as the American salary bills are and we were like and the world shut down and I'm like do we just not even start it do we just fold the whole thing no let's go and it saved us because of course in that mad two and a half year window whatever it was certain people could travel to certain places then that would shut down and then they could go, you remember that bloody traffic light system in the UK?

31:42So you had a kind of first mover advantage because you were a travel agent, a PR company that actually kept going. Yeah, and by the way, we didn't just keep going. We absolutely thrilled. I was like, as soon as somewhere went green on this traffic light system, I'd be like, come on, I'd grab a group of great journalists. I'm sure I grabbed you at some point. Let's get there. Let's show people that it's safe to travel. Let's go and have some fun. Let's have a laugh. People were desperate to travel. Yeah, desperate. And that's when I found out, as I was on one of these amazing trips, drinking sort of endless glasses of raisins or whatever, that I was pregnant, which was rather unexpected.

32:18So there we are. And then I, yeah, I got pregnant very unexpectedly. I didn't know I was pregnant until very late on, because I never knew, because of all the things that happened to me. I didn't have periods. I had never had to go through all that. which was rather marvelous. Wait a minute, so you were amenorrheic? You had no periods? Yes, I didn't have periods for... Do you know why? Just because of, obviously, nothing was working properly down there. So I remember calling my gynecologist and she's like, so what happened is I was coming back from Spain with a group of journalists and one of them said to me, Jules, I think you might be pregnant.

32:56Why did she say that? And I've been talking about sort of, you know, my boobs being sore and, you know, this, that and the other. Were you showing? Very personal now, aren't I? Were you showing? I think I was probably showing a little bit. But I was also like explaining my sort of hormones and stuff. Yeah. She said, do you think you could be pregnant? I said, no, I can't be pregnant. And then I was thinking about it on the flight home. So I was having a glass of wine. And I was like, I wonder if I am. So I called my mom. And she's like, darling, you can't be pregnant. No way. Absolutely not. And so I got back to Norfolk a day later.

33:27And she bought 12 pregnancy tests from the local pharmacy. in the local village. I think she just thought, you know, we've got to really make sure. So I peed into a pot, we put them all in, it went off like bloody alarms. It couldn't tell me how pregnant I was because I was so over the pregnancy fate, you know, normal, what it can tell you. And my then boyfriend, obviously was somebody that didn't think I could have children. Had just come out of a tricky divorce. And so it was rather a surprise to him. Wait, he'd just come out of a tricky divorce? Yes, he had. And you had split up with your long-term boyfriend, the doctor who told you we had irritable bowel syndrome so anyway it was rather unexpected but what was very funny about the pregnancy test thing is Gus went my husband went to tell his mum that I was pregnant he said I've got some news she says is Julia pregnant and he said how do you know well everybody saw Leah going into the pharmacy and buying 12 pregnancy tests and they live in the same village so you can imagine yeah I love that so brilliant can't keep a a secret in wells next to sea no way tell us a bit about what it's like doing your own podcast with Richard E Grant which is brilliant called hotels with history it's just been like a like actually kind of a dream I'm a I'm a historian so I love the geeky side of travel more than anything it's why I got into I'm a failed spy that's what I wanted to do.

35:00I wanted to go into the diplomatic service and I failed miserably and ended up in this hilarious world of PR. But the thing that has really driven me the whole way through my career is a desire to learn about the history of places, the backstory, the people, the culture, everything, as much as all the lovely stuff. yeah um so i think hotels are the windows of these incredible destinations you take somewhere like the adlon in berlin which has lived through you know the fall of the german empire world war one the rise of nazism it's there it's on you know the center of berlin these eyes on it so i basically i'd done a few trips for richard um you know love about he loves africa and things and I'd sent him away on a few trips.

35:53And I just sent him a completely random email one day saying, I'm thinking about doing a podcast about the stories of the great hotels of the world. And he replied pretty much immediately saying, I love it. Yes, I'm in. And I was like, oh, my God, now it's a thing. And we started two years ago. We did series one, obviously, like deeply intimidating being opposite him in a room. He's just so utterly brilliant. the voices that he does of people when he plays, he'll sometimes be Queen Elizabeth or Ernest Hemingway or Marlena Dietrich. Can you do accents? I can't do accents at all. No, of course I can't.

36:35It is scripted. It's scripted because I wanted it to be a geeky podcast. Don't think sort of gossipy, silly in any way. It's a historical podcast. and so the critical thing for us was factually getting it right and it was doing it chronologically as well and so like I started looking at we started with the Gritti Palace in Venice which goes so far back we're talking the Medici we're talking Doge's of Venice and we're talking Marco Polo have I got that wrong? no, Medici's of Florence sorry but yeah I'm sure they had some influence or they were like trying to kill each other or something but no you're talking about lorenzo gritty doge of venice we're talking so you know 15th century venice 16th century venice and the facts are so intense that there was just no way we started seeing if we could do it you know as a natural conversation and it and it just turned into all the other sort of a bit vacuous podcasts and it's ah going down the grand canal so we were like we made a conscious decision to make it scripted so we could be so factually correct.

37:43I mean, look, we go off script, we laugh at stuff. Richard has visited all the hotels. So I've been to most of them myself. I've got my team who helped me really look for the great, great historic hotels of the world. They have to be the most luxury now, but they've got to be the ones that tell the great stories. With huge stories, yeah. With huge stories. And we properly deep dive into them, and then Richard goes and visits. He's got to visit them. He does every single one. He does, and he loves traveling. Like, the other day he went to St. Bart's. And I was like, look, Richard, how many nights do you...

38:19He's like, I've got two nights. And I was like, it's a really bloody long... You can't go to St. Bart's for two nights. And you've got to fly via Paris and St. Martin. He whizzed in. He's so game. He loved it. It's a total and utter joy to do this with him. and we it's evolving without us even trying it's got this kind of like dedicated loyal following especially in america because i think first of all they love him the first time i read a few reviews they were like we tune in for richly grant who's this annoying posh girl and i was like he's like never read the reviews don't ever read the never we never go below the lines never read the reviews but um the americans love it they love this and they they're booking from it that's amazing um yeah jules i mean are you do you have to be a bit disciplined about not always doing hotels you represent because you do represent some of the most amazing hotels in the world we do but yeah from the hotel ducap Eden rock to the bristol yeah you know you have to like cast your net a bit wider yeah and by the way the main criteria is they've got to be over a hundred years old and so like for example i i think i we look after probably one of the great great hotels the world past the lacquer on lake como where you know truly visiting you're visiting no i'm going for tea i'm not staying exactly you're going for tea so it's but it's only actually three three years old it could tell its own story but of course because of that it's not going to be in hotels with history but its sister hotel there's not a client grand hotel tramezzo was you know one of the first hotels created on Lake Como helped create the destination as a tourist destination fascinating so I've I would say yes a couple of them are ours but of this next series one is ours the rest are just hotels that we've chosen because they have this insane history so we've got Copacabana Palace coming in Rio de Janeiro the Mount Nelson in Cape Town which is just like extraordinary the story of the Mount Nelson because of course it's the story of the kind of travellers going around the Cape to get to the east it's trade it's everything every great hotel has a Churchill story and a Samuel Bay story I love it and then what I also love is like how these hotels have had such immense disruption most of them were turned into hospitals in World War II or World War I um it's been a stop start in the last you know 150 years of travel because of global events which is what's happening now so it's kind of it's fascinating it's fascinating and then I also have this other thing called women and hospitality which is the thing which is a concept I created really close to my heart because the hospitality industry is absolutely a man's world it is unbelievable but there are some brilliant women who are really challenging that coming through there's some great female CEOs now but it is very very very slow women in hospitality are really in housekeeping or PR and marketing but there's very few sort of female general managers so I've been developing this symposium which we do every year at Glen Eagles with some amazing women Angela Hartnett and great people like that where we really talk about you know women in restaurants women in the drinks and spirits industry women in hotels and I've loved doing that because actually there were some incredible women developing hotels clarages a husband and a wife but the woman the wife was as much the driving force the Adlon Kempinski in Berlin so there are there's a there's a story there which I love to tell Jules we got to the moment in the podcast where we ask you about your difficult time or when have you had to be most difficult this is called difficult women let's let's get the first thing that's come into your into your head the most difficult time for me was that time when I had to split my business in half and yeah rip apart everything I'd built did you lose a lot of money as well I lost so much money I I was you know I was very ill and weak at that point and I had to go and completely prove myself all over again so the most difficult time in my life was that um I've I I guess my my most difficult thing is on a daily basis is walking into a room and trying to generate the confidence that I need to go out there and prove myself to people that I know my staff that they can trust me with their incredible brands and I struggle with that daily I actually bizarrely lack a lot of self-confidence in how I look and I'm not saying bizarrely and like that I think I look good at all I have and that's part of the reason I wear pretty dresses for work and I put on incredibly high heels because I actually lack a lot of confidence I used there were times in when I was starting in my career where I just sometimes just couldn't get into work because I couldn't put on something and make myself feel good and even walk down the road because I didn't feel good about myself and there are still days when I struggle with that so I kind of put on my armor and my armor is my shoes and my dresses and I do my hair and I get up and I go out there because yeah I've chosen an industry that is very male dominated and hard it's a harsh industry as well you know so I would say that that's all connected right that's but what I realized that I have as women do just an unbelievably hard spine we are so strong you know that that to me is um what resonates the most is like what we can actually take on what we can do what we can deliver and how strong we can be and what we can live through but jules i mean you just need to take on so much and you seem to do it all so effortlessly and I'm really fascinated and touched by that answer because I've known you for so long and I would have never I'm gonna cry now and I would have never guessed that you have those yeah I do internal yeah you have to like put on your big girl dancing shoes and your pants and your big your tie heels and to face the world because you make it look effortless well you're You're so sweet.

45:07I feel like my life is complete chaos most of the time at the moment. And obviously, I absolutely love what I do. And now juggling being a mum as well and travelling. And having a husband. And two stepchildren. I know there's a lot on your plate. And Julia. Jules Perrone, at that, we're going to have to leave it because we've run out of time a while ago. Thank you so much for being this week's difficult one. Thank you, my friend. thank you thank you for listening to another episode of my difficult women podcast don't forget to subscribe and download wherever you get your podcasts to make sure the latest episode is always ready to go every friday afternoon bye this has been a global production