Intimate conversations with the brilliant minds shaping Costa Rica and Panama’s luxury travel landscape. Explore the philosophies, passions, and innovative thinking driving the region’s most exceptional guest experiences.
It feels reductive to call Pasha a villa, because it’s so much more than that. Pasha is a curated private estate: secluded, spacious, intricately designed, intertwined with nature and expertly set up for spending time with the people you love.
On Playa Hermosa, just north of Santa Teresa, Pasha stretches across nine beachfront acres, with a main house and three villas woven through gardens, pools and spaces made for spending time together. There’s a warmth to the whole experience here that feels far removed from the formality of a hotel, yet behind it sits the infrastructure and round-the-clock service that many hotels would envy.
It’s exactly the kind of base we love to design a wider journey through Costa Rica around: surfing the local shores, exploring the surrounding nature, and then setting out by helicopter for adventures around Arenal Volcano, the Osa Peninsula and beyond, before coming back to your very own haven.
Much of Pasha’s character comes from Jennifer Lotz. Years in hospitality took her all over the world, through large-scale hotels, fine dining and teaching, before eventually bringing her home. Along the way, she learned the mechanics of excellent service, but also what she didn’t want: something overly prescribed. She came to Pasha wanting the freedom to make hospitality more instinctive, more personal and more responsive to the individuals staying there.
Five years after first setting foot on the grounds, she and her team have given the property a personality of its own, while redefining the experience around each and every group that arrives.
Javier sat down with Jennifer to find out how they do it, read on for his thoughts.
“We Follow Their Every Move Without Them Knowing”
What has always struck me about Pasha is how completely looked after you feel when you step over the threshold. Great service is often described as attentive, but this goes much further. At Pasha, it’s about paying close enough attention to anticipate what a guest might want before they even think to ask for it. Each stay has its own flow, completely molded to the guest, and it’s an ease that you might take for granted, until you realize how much work is happening around you to make it feel that way.
“We follow their every move without them knowing” explains Jennifer with a laugh, aware of how that sounds. “The team knows guests by name before they arrive and has already started building a picture. If someone heads to the beach, they have a general idea of when they’ll return and make sure a member of the team is already waiting there with whatever drink or snack they know that guest likes.”
“It’s all those little ‘wow’ moments they don’t expect,” she tells me. For one family, that meant bringing in specialist nannies and preparing individual activity baskets around each child’s age and interests, leaving their parents to enjoy a day together without needing to orchestrate it themselves. For a guest staying several weeks, the team placed his photographs around the house. His dogs were walked every day before he woke, and his coffee, with the milk frothed just as he liked it and served at precisely the right temperature, was waiting when he was ready to start the day.
It becomes clear very quickly that every detail here is taken care of. You trust the team completely, let go, and become fully present. For me, that is where Pasha’s idea of hospitality really begins: not simply knowing what you want before you ask, but creating the space for you to stop thinking about what you need altogether.
Not Taking the Risk Is the Real Risk
That trust gives the team room to do something more interesting than simply fulfilling requests; occasionally, they challenge you. When Jennifer and I spoke, I put to her an idea I think about often: stepping outside of your comfort zone can have brilliant results. If you always stick to what you know, nothing is likely to go badly wrong, but neither do you create the conditions for an unexpected moment that changes the tone of a trip. Sometimes, having the best possible experience means taking a risk, or at least a small leap of faith.
Jennifer didn’t hesitate, “we take the risk, because you have to! We know when there’s something a guest should experience. If you don’t like it, fine, we can stop. But give it a try.”
She gave me the example of a group who arrived in need of a change of pace from day-to-day life. She proposed salsa lessons, an idea which was met with plenty of doubt, but she sensed there was room to try. Before long, the guests were dancing in the middle of the property, laughing and letting go. It became a standout favorite of their stay.
Once guests feel secure, both with the team and in the space around them, they become more willing to be a little vulnerable and step beyond what they would ordinarily choose for themselves. But Jennifer understands that it’s a fine line, and Pasha never takes that risk blindly, they earn the right to take it.
The Teams Essence Makes Pasha What It Is
All of this runs through a team with a history together. When I asked Jennifer how the level of service becomes so instinctive, she took me back to a boutique beach hotel she previously managed in Santa Teresa. “I had a great team. We did a lot of training, and it became like family,” she told me. When she moved to Pasha following the private sale of the hotel, many of them followed. You can’t manufacture what that creates: fluency, familiarity and a shared understanding of who steps forward, what needs doing and when to disappear. It’s like a well-choregraphed dance.
The clearest proof comes from returning guests (of which they have many), when they ask after staff members by name: “Will Laura still be there? Is Pereiro around?”. When I queried Jennifer what “fully staffed” means at Pasha, she described what sounded more like a hotel operation than a villa: multiple talented chefs and servers, housekeepers who move through the estate almost unseen, a concierge, a whole maintenance team, and round-the-clock security. Two team members even sleep on site in private quarters, there to respond at any hour, but invisible unless needed.
“It’s not only my essence,” Jennifer tells me. “It’s the team’s essence that makes the place what it is.”
When I visited, I felt the team’s personality come out particularly in the food. There’s no fixed menu, because the approach is not one-size-fits-all. Instead, the Costa Rican chefs get to know the guests, and then cook around how they like to eat. The food is generous and shared, with the feeling of a home rather than a restaurant (although the quality could rival any top eatery). One guest was so taken with the level of cooking that she invited a Pasha chef to fly out to her private home and spend ten days training her own kitchen staff.
Let the Trip Come to You
One of the ideas we kept coming back to was that Pasha isn’t simply the place you return to between experiences, it’s somewhere where the experiences come to you.
Jennifer reminded me of one Journey family whose plans were interrupted by rain. Rather than accept doing nothing much with the day, the team brought in a ceramicist from Montezuma, complete with pottery wheels, and transformed the covered yoga deck into a workshop. The family loved it so much, that this one-off activity ended up continuing for four days, and pottery is now something Pasha guests regularly enjoy.
That same thinking can take very different forms, and we relish going the extra mile with the experiences Journey curates around a stay here. A morning could begin surfing the local breaks, before a helicopter collects you from Pasha for an afternoon around Arenal Volcano or mountain biking through forest trails. Another day, maybe you’d prefer to stay closer to home, with an expert-led yoga session incorporating sound healing, followed by a sunset picnic on the beach.
One experience melts into another within Journey’s curated itineraries, and that flow is very deliberate. It comes from knowing the destination intimately: what works best at different moments of the day, how much to build in, when to leave space, and who to call on locally to make something special happen. That knowledge allows us to create a journey that moves naturally between your private home, Santa Teresa and the wider landscapes around it. Pasha is an exceptional base for the trip, while we can take care of everything beyond the gates.
Perhaps what impressed me most in talking to Jennifer is the attitude that they should always seek to outdo themselves. She regularly brings outside eyes, in the form of hospitality experts and consultants, into Pasha and asks a wonderfully simple question: tell me what I’m not seeing. Baristas come in to improve the coffee; service specialists challenge routines; even the property itself is continually reimagined.
It reminded me of something I tell my own team: at this level, you have to maintain an awareness that you’re not good enough yet, and you never will be. Not because the standard isn’t high, but because there should always be another idea, another detail, another way to make the experience better.
That pursuit is something Journey and Pasha share: we never assume we have reached perfection, but we keep striving to get there.
Ready to start dreaming up your Costa Rica journey around a stay at Pasha? Speak to our team and we’ll start crafting your customized trip.
