Oli Corkhill

Oli Corkhill

Name: Oli Corkhill

Company: CEO, Leo Trippi

Playlist: Songs to focus - and reminisce - to

Plato once said that “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind”; a more contemporary sage, Oprah Winfrey, has referred to skiing as ” the next best thing to having wings.”

Clearly there’s a spiritual commonality between sounds that convey emotion and the soul-enriching process of being powered by gravity, through freshly fallen powder, atop a pair of downhill blades. 

Just ask Oli Corkhill, CEO of Leo Trippi - a multi-award-winning luxury travel company, which specialises in tailor-made ski holidays and unique experiences on and around the slopes.

“My obsession with skiing started at around 10 or 11 but it was when I took an early gap year and moved to Verbier, basically to be a ski bum, at around 16 that I began to see it was my calling,” he says.

After a few years falling more and more deeply in love with the sport, and a stint as an instructor, Corkhill decided to “get a proper job” and, around the 2010/2011 season, founded Alpine Guru, which rented out chalets in the village in south-western Switzerland which had become his adopted home. 

Leo Trippi acquired the company in 2016, but Corkhill’s raison d'être, as well as that of his business partner Florian Steiger, remains the same:

“The core of what we do is helping people select the right the right place to stay,” he says.

“Once they’re there, we want to highlight the amazing things you can do in any destination and come up with cool experiences such as a dining experience on a mountain - after all, no one can simply travel with a Michelin Star chef. We’re very much pushing the experience angle - that’s the big trend.  People want to be guided and want experts and I think that's what we do well.”

Many of Corkhill’s chosen tracks below transport him back to those carefree days of yore: “In Verbier back in the day, one song tended to be the soundtrack for a season,” he says, “and I’d play it on repeat - that was until a coach in my final couple of years who told me I was never allowed to listen to the music while it was actually skiing… Only on the chairlift.”

These days a sensible businessman, Corkhill relishes a playlist which helps him focus on the less adrenaline-fueled aspects of day-to-day life.

“Often I'll be in the office on my own, maybe even on a Saturday, needing to do get more work done on something like financial reports in two hours than I normally do over any other two hours,” he says. 

“On those occasions, music that you’re not actively listening to but it’s there, and helps you get out of that procrastination mood - that gets you in that zone and keeps you focused in a way you can just switch off from when you’re finished - is important to me.”

That’s not to say some of his tracks of choice don’t hark back to the days of back-to-back on-piste thrills and off-piste hedonism…

OLI’S PLAYLIST