Six people, two studios (Lisbon & Kyoto), one rule: every itinerary you read on this site was walked, eaten, and slept through by one of us in the last eighteen months.
Three of us had been guides for bigger operators and watched the same thing happen on every trip — guests arriving at a hotel that didn't match the brochure, dinners at the same four restaurants the bus tours used, and a "local guide" who read from a script.
So we quit, pooled our savings, and started Travel Explorer with one rule: no trip on the site we hadn't personally taken in the last year. Fourteen years later, the rule is the same. That's why the calendar is small.
Most of our competitors book a trip after a thirty-minute call with a hotel. We scout, sleep in the rooms, walk the routes, eat at the restaurants — then write the itinerary.
You'll work with the people who scout the trips. We don't have a sales team — your first email is from a planner who's walked the route.
Founder · Trip planner
Mediterranean specialist. Has slept in 140 Santorini rooms so you don't have to.
Co-founder · Field lead
Latin America & the Philippines. 11 years guiding in Patagonia alone.
Head of research
Spends four months a year in Japan. Once lived in a Kyoto temple for a season.
Trip planner
West & East Africa, plus the Canadian Rockies. Started as a guest in 2015.
Portugal & Morocco
Lisbon-based. Books every riad, convent, and family hotel on the Iberian peninsula.
Japan & SE Asia
Kyoto-based. Sources the mountain ryokans and the midnight ramen counters.
How Travel Explorer grew from a one-page WordPress site in 2011 to a small, profitable, deliberately-bounded company.
Wren runs the first Alentejo trip with two friends. Six guests, all booked on a WordPress page.
Wren and Mateo rent a two-room office above a tasca in Graça. We hire our first planner.
Anya joins from a Tokyo tour operator. We add Kyoto, Naoshima, and the Inland Sea in one season.
We pause for sixteen months and refund every booking in full. Three staff stay; we don't lay anyone off.
Every itinerary is offset before any guest flies. We publish the math on the journal, quarterly.
Hiro joins as our second in-country lead. We cap departures at 84 per year — and stay there.