Elena Laurent

Elena grew up in Bordeaux, where her parents ran a small inn and she learned, before she could read a ledger, that hospitality is mostly noticing. She trained at a hotel school in Lausanne and spent the next twelve years at the front desk and on the guest relations floor — in Paris, then Marrakech, then Lisbon — watching which hotels people wrote to afterwards and which they only reviewed.

She left in 2011 with one client, a short list of owners she trusted, and a conviction that most trips were over-arranged and under-considered. Axplorers began at a kitchen table in Alfama. The studio is still small by design: every journey is shaped by a person who has been there, and every partner is one Elena has stayed with, eaten with, or argued with about the breakfast.

Today she sets the studio’s creative direction, leads its partnerships, and decides what Axplorers will and will not do. She reads each itinerary before it goes out and has returned more than a few for being too busy. Outside work she walks the river at Belém at six, cooks badly on Sundays, and keeps a notebook of rooms she would like to go back to.