Since 2011
Why we stayed small
We would rather plan forty journeys beautifully than four hundred adequately.
Marivela started because Elena Fioravanti got tired of watching people have a mediocre week on an island she loved.
She had run a fourteen-room hotel on Salina for nine years and could see exactly where the trips went wrong: too many islands, the wrong order, the boat booked on the one day the wind was up, and nobody to call when it all came apart at four in the afternoon. In 2011 she started planning trips instead of letting rooms, and the house grew from there — one region at a time, and only when there was someone worth hiring to run it.
How we work
Four things we will not trade
Six regions, not sixty
We plan Italy, Japan, Norway, Kenya, Chile and Indonesia. We turn down everything else, including work we would like to have. A house that sells forty countries knows forty countries the way a brochure does.
The person who plans it has been there this year
Every advisor here works one or two regions and goes back to them annually. Sho walks the Kiso section twice a year and revises the notes each time. That is the difference between a current itinerary and a well-formatted one.
We will tell you not to go
Wrong month, wrong pace, children too young, altitude too high. We lose a few bookings a year this way and it is the most valuable thing we do.
Under four hundred journeys a year
Roughly twenty-six hours of planning goes into each trip. There is a hard ceiling on how many of those a house of eleven people can do well, and we would rather hit it than grow past it.
The numbers
Small, on purpose, and capped
- Journeys planned each year
- Under 400
- Average planning time per trip
- 26 hours
- People, across three desks
- 11
- Travellers who come back
- 61%
In 2022 we set a ceiling on how many journeys we plan in a year and stopped taking new regions. Growth past that point would have to come out of the twenty-six hours, and that is the product.
How it happened
Fifteen years, one region at a time
- 2011Elena leaves the hotel on Salina and plans the first eleven journeys from a kitchen table in Rome.
- 2013James Mwangi joins after eleven years guiding in Laikipia. East Africa opens.
- 2014Sho Nakamura opens the Japan desk in Kyoto. The first Nakasendo walk runs in October.
- 2016Ingrid Halvorsen brings Lofoten, and with it the habit of writing an alternative for every day.
- 2018Clara Benitez joins from Andean fieldwork and rebuilds the Atacama itineraries around acclimatisation.
- 2019Sumba opens, slowly, with one guide and a great deal of asking permission.
- 2022The house caps itself at four hundred journeys a year and stops taking new regions.
- 2026Eleven people, three desks, six regions, and sixty-one per cent of travellers returning.
The people
