Taking an accessible-luxury travel company from idea to launch

The client is a newly launched travel company created by an entrepreneur with previous experience building businesses in the sector.

Its proposition focuses on guided journeys through destinations such as Africa, the Middle East and Eurasia. The company wanted to make luxury feel more accessible while preserving the personal attention, discovery and emotional value associated with a high-end trip.

The founder had a clear initial idea and needed an external team capable of turning it into a coherent business proposition, brand and digital product.

The company was starting from zero in a competitive market. It did not yet have internal brand, design or engineering teams, so the work extended from defining the offer to building the experience customers would use to discover and configure a trip.

The website needed to carry much of the early commercial journey by itself. A prospective traveller should be able to understand the proposition, explore destinations and assemble an itinerary while still feeling the care and detail expected from a luxury service.

This made the configurator part of the product proposition. It had to make a complex, highly personal purchase feel clear and engaging before a member of the travel team entered the conversation.

mendesaltaren and Tailor worked as a combined Modulor Studios team across a series of intensive sessions covering the proposition, brand, product and technology.

mendesaltaren developed the conceptual and visual system around five forces: memory, experience, personalisation, emotion and authenticity. The work included the brand manifesto, identity, typography, colour, art direction, motion principles and design system.

Those sessions also changed the commercial proposition. An early model separated the offer into luxury and “Top Luxury” tiers. The team simplified it into one luxury category with optional upgrades, making the experience easier to understand and configure.

Tailor then built the production website and trip configurator. Users can select a hotel, choose morning and afternoon activities for each day and add upgrades as they shape their itinerary.

The site uses Astro with static generation, giving a newly launched brand a fast, crawlable foundation for competing through search. React components add movement where the experience needs it, including the camera-like interaction in the homepage slider, without loading the entire site as a client-side application.

The configurator translates a detailed travel offer into a step-by-step flow while remaining close to the original design. The result combines the clarity needed for a self-guided journey with the visual standards of the brand.

The original ambition also included an agentic experience that could help travellers explore or configure their trips.

Before committing an AI Engineering team, Modulor Studios ran a one-week 226 discovery and diagnosis lab. Modulor assembles each lab around its objective, bringing in the relevant combination of product, design, engineering and data specialists. For this assessment, data experts evaluated whether the available information could support the proposed experience at the required level of quality.

The conclusion was that the company's data was not yet ready.

That conclusion changed the investment sequence. The company could launch its brand and core product, improve the foundations the agent would depend on and revisit the idea with stronger data, avoiding the cost of building an AI workflow before it had a realistic path to useful results.

The engagement took the company from an initial founder vision to a launched brand and digital product. The website is live with destinations, trips and itineraries already loaded, and the configurator gives the new business a distinctive way to present and personalise its offer.

The AI lab also produced an immediate decision: postpone a significant development investment until the underlying data can support it. Because the company launched only recently, commercial, SEO and usage metrics are not yet mature enough to report.