Travel advisor Maksym Shkurupii didn't just book his clients onto the world's most legendary train journey — he lived every gilded, velvet-lined mile of it himself, from the Tuileries to the Bosphorus.
At a Glance
The Paris-to-Istanbul Simplon-Orient-Express runs once yearly and requires fifteen months' advance booking. The five-night journey includes four pre-departure nights in Paris at Le Meurice, five nights aboard the historic train with gourmet dining, guided stops in Budapest, Romania, and Varna, and three nights in Istanbul at The Peninsula. Full cost runs approximately $60,000 per traveller.
There are trips, and then there are pilgrimages. Maksym Shkurupii, a travel advisor who measures success not in itineraries sold but in memories delivered, knows the difference. When two clients arrived with a single item on their list, the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express done properly, not the one-night taster to Venice but the legendary grand journey from Paris to Istanbul, five nights aboard the very route the original train ran in 1883, Shkurupii didn't reach for a brochure. He started planning fifteen months in advance, and he made sure he would be on that train himself.
"Some trips are vacations," Shkurupii says. "This one was a pilgrimage."
The Architecture of an Effortless Journey
What looks effortless to a client rarely is. The journey Shkurupii constructed was built around a single philosophy: the train is the centrepiece, and everything else exists to protect it. That meant four nights in Paris before boarding, settled into Le Meurice, the Dorchester Collection's grande dame on Rue de Rivoli, with Executive Rooms overlooking the Tuileries and the Eiffel Tower shimmering beyond. The purpose was deliberate. Jet lag, rushed mornings, and the anxious energy of travel transitions have no place at the Gare de l'Est. When his travellers stepped onto the polished platform and a steward escorted them into a cabin of marquetry, velvet, and soft lamplight, they were ready to receive it.
The Paris–Istanbul departure runs once a year and sells out far in advance, and Shkurupii is clear-eyed about what that means for advisors and dreamers alike. "The difference between 'dream' and 'booked' was simply knowing when to move — and moving," he explains. Fifteen months of lead time is not excessive for a journey of this nature. It is simply the cost of entry.
Five Nights Across a Continent
The train departed Gare de l'Est with a three-course lunch as France slid past the windows. By evening, guests were in gowns and black tie, aperitifs in hand in Bar Car 3674, listening to a resident pianist at the baby grand while chef Jean Imbert's menus emerged from the kitchen. France gave way to Austria in the dark, and travellers fell asleep to the gentle rhythm of a train that has been making this crossing since the age of kings.
Budapest brought guides waiting at the platform, a city tour, and a night off the train at the Four Seasons Gresham Palace, followed by a Danube dinner cruise beneath the illuminated Hungarian Parliament. Through the Carpathians, breakfast arrived in the cabin as the mountains rose outside. At Sinaia in Romania, the group visited Peles Castle, the fairy-tale palace that the very first Orient Express passengers glimpsed in 1883 at the King's personal invitation, before a night at Bucharest's storied Athénée Palace. At Varna on the Black Sea, the train paused long enough for an aperitif on the sand. A final dinner carried everyone across the ancient Thracian Plain toward Istanbul.
The train's terminus at Istanbul Sirkeci Station, the very station built for the Orient Express, marked what Shkurupii calls "the end of the line, in the most literal and romantic sense." Three nights followed at The Peninsula in Karaköy, a Superior Bosphorus Room with water traffic gliding past the window, no alarm clocks, and time enough for the bazaars, a hammam, and a six-hour private food tour through the city's markets and backstreets that, in Shkurupii's words, "turns a hotel stay into a memory."
The Details Nobody Sees
The logistics beneath a journey like this are where an advisor earns every fee. The most comfortable flight routings, Air France nonstop from Vancouver to Paris inbound and Turkish Airlines nonstop home, cannot be ticketed as a single roundtrip. Forced into one-ways, Shkurupii discovered that the Air France roundtrip was cheaper than the one-way fare, so he bought it and dated the return to coincide with his clients' Ireland trip later in the year. One ticket served two journeys and saved money on both.
Arrivals were handled with the same precision. A meet-and-greet agent was waiting at the Paris aircraft door, customs fast-tracked, luggage handled, a Mercedes V-Class waiting to deliver the group to Le Meurice. The clients' own mid-trip assessment was simple and telling: "All transportation and airport transfers were done very smoothly."
Then there is the matter of protection. The Orient Express carries one of travel's strictest cancellation policies, full payment due six months out, effectively non-refundable. Shkurupii built comprehensive medical and cancellation insurance at $3,000 per traveller into the architecture from the start. "On a journey that can't be rebooked," he notes, "protection isn't an add-on — it's part of the architecture."
What Legends Deserve: The Honest Briefing
Shkurupii is not an advisor who softens the truth to close a sale. Before any client boards, he walks them through what the experience actually involves. The historic twin cabins are compact, beautifully appointed but with a wash basin rather than an ensuite, and day seats that convert to bunks at night. The dining is sumptuous, rich with multi-course menus across five evenings, which is precisely why the lighter off-train nights in Budapest and Bucharest are welcomed even by the most enthusiastic gastronomes. The dress code is not a suggestion: jacket and tie at minimum for dinner, no jeans or shorts aboard, and most guests arrive in black tie because that is the spirit the train demands.
"I walk every client through all of this before booking," Shkurupii says, "because a $60,000 train journey should come with zero surprises." It is this quality of preparation, the frank conversation alongside the romantic vision, that defines the difference between an advisor and a booking engine.
Who This Journey Is For
This is not a trip for the traveller who measures a holiday by the number of countries ticked or the kilometres covered. The Orient Express rewards those who surrender to pace, to ritual, to the pleasure of a meal that lasts two hours because the landscape outside deserves that long a look. It is for the couple who has always said "one day." It is for the traveller who understands that the journey itself is the destination. Those who need ensuite bathrooms or bristle at a dress code will find the compact cabins and formal evenings a friction, not a feature.
For everyone else, Shkurupii's counsel is consistent: book early, build the bookends, trust the architecture, and allow the train to do what it has done since 1883, which is remind its passengers that travel at its finest is not about speed. It is about arrival, in every sense of the word.
With North Korea and Japan next on his personal wish list, Shkurupii shows no signs of slowing down. If those journeys teach him even a fraction of what the Orient Express did, his clients will be the richer for it.
