Welcome to Ella,
We do travel differently.
Travel advice should always be in your best interest — not ours.
Ella gives you direct access to people who know a destination deeply — and we never take money from the businesses they recommend. No commissions. No affiliate revenue. No sponsored placement. Ever.
Travelers have never had more ways to access information — from TikTok reels to ChatGPT itineraries, the internet has made it incredibly easy to get travel recommendations on demand. It has also made it exponentially more difficult to know why someone is recommending something, and even more so, to find the places you’re actually looking for.
Is something being recommended because it’s genuinely good? Because it’s popular? Because an algorithm thinks you’ll click? Or because someone gets paid when you book it?
We believe travelers deserve another option — independent human judgement, with no strings attached.
Who are our local advisors?
Local advisors are journalists, photographers, guides, sommeliers, and entrepreneurs. The one thing they all have in common? A deep, personal knowledge of the places they cover. Being an expert here comes with a responsibility: committing to a higher standard of advice.
Independent
Don’t allow commercial relationships or personal interests to influence their recommendations. Full disclosure of anything that could reasonably affect their advice.
Honest
Being honest means admitting when you don’t know something, or being willing to check in with your network rather than give an answer you’re not confident in. Advisors will always let you know their take.
Useful
Advisors won’t overwhelm travelers with options simply because they can: they’ll use judgment to narrow the field of possibilities and help get you to the right decision.
Personal
Advisors will always make an effort to really understand your needs before giving advice. There is no single right answer when it comes to travel experiences: the right thing for one person can be completely wrong for another.
Willing to Disagree
An advisor’s job isn’t to validate an itinerary, it’s to make it better. Our aim is to always be respectful, and that means respecting your time by telling you when there’s a flaw in the plan.
Current Knowledge, Always
Destinations change, restaurants close, neighborhoods evolve, new places emerge, and old favorites decline. Good local knowledge has a shelf life and we expect that advisors to always be up to speed on the latest.
Authentic, local experts for every trip.
“Local expert” shouldn’t be a marketing label anyone can claim. Our local advisors are selected because they demonstrate a combination of:
Significant lived experience. They have spent substantial time in, or have a deep connection to, the destination they advise on.
Demonstrated knowledge. They can show that they genuinely understand the destination — its places, people, culture, neighborhoods, food, experiences and nuances.
Local network. They have relationships and connections that give them perspective beyond what is readily available through search.
Verified expertise. Their background, experience and knowledge are reviewed and verified by us before they can advise travelers.
Being well travelled, good at research, or an having a big platform isn’t enough. We are looking for people whose knowledge of a place is earned, demonstrated & useful.
What can you ask an Ella advisor?
Our advisors offer 30 and 60 minute consultation sessions.
Review my itinerary.
Already planned your trip? Have someone who knows the destination tell you what to change, cut or add.
Help me decide where to stay.
Tell us what kind of trip you're taking and we'll help you choose the right neighborhood and place.
Tell me what’s (not) worth it.
Skip the tourist traps, bad meals, overrated experiences and lengthy day trips that aren't worth your limited time.
Plan the trip with me.
Starting from scratch? Bounce ideas off of someone who knows and use an expert's local knowledge to build a trip around what you actually care about.
If we wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, we won’t recommend it to you.
We don’t promise that every recommendation will be perfect; no one who genuinely knows a destination can. What we do promise something much more important: the advice you’re getting is honest, authentic, and independent.
We never take money from travel suppliers.
No hotel commissions. No restaurant commissions. No tour commissions. No affiliate revenue. No sponsored recommendations. No paid placement of any sort.
Booking a place is the easy part — deciding where to go is what’s hard and once you mix in commissions that whole system becomes polluted / biased.
We tell you what we’d tell a friend.
Our experts aren’t here to give you the longest possible list. They’re here to help you make better decisions with your limited time, money and attention.
That means telling you what we’d definitely do / skip, what’s overrated vs genuinely worth the splurge, what’s changed, and when we simply don’t know
We’re paid for our expertise — never for what you choose.
Advisor’s income does not increase because you spend more on your trip, book a specific restaurant, or choose a particular hotel (or even stay at a hotel at all; we’re here for the Airbnb travelers, the points travelers, and more).
Their job is simple: to give you the best advice they can so that you can have your best trip.
The 3 things every traveler should know when seeking advice.
Who is advising me?
You can see who the person is, what they know and why they qualify to advise you.
Who does your advisor work for?
You. Our advisors are paid for their time and expertise — never by the businesses they recommend.
Why are they recommending this?
Because they believe it is right for you and your trip, not because someone paid them to appear in front of you.
Meet the Founder
While I’ve spent the last 15 years traveling the world and working in tech we've made extraordinary progress in making travel easier to book. You can find the cheapest flight in seconds, book a hotel from anywhere, and have a car waiting with a few taps.
We've built an enormous machine for selling travel, but in doing so we’ve neglected the part that matters most, the reason we go in the first place: the experience itself.
That's the problem I left Google to solve.
And I'm building alongside some of the brightest women in travel — those with deep knowledge, lived experience and extraordinary local networks.
Together, we're creating new travel ecosystem: one that enables knowledge to travel directly from the people who have it to the people who need it. Because the travel experiences we actually seek aren't the ones with the biggest marketing budgets.
Solving this involves restructuring incentives and starting with the data that matters — real, human judgement. Join us?
— Kim Callender, Founder @Ella