Priya Raghunathan

Priya spent her first six years in Dubai hotel operations, almost all of them on the shifts where things go wrong. She learned the work at three in the morning — the missed connection, the closed border, the guest who needs a doctor in a city whose language they do not speak — and she learned that the difference between a ruined trip and a good story is usually one person answering quickly.

She joined Axplorers in 2018 to build the desk she had always wanted to call. It started as her and a phone. It now covers six continents, answers in under an hour at any hour, and is the reason the studio can promise what it promises. She wrote the handover system that passes open questions west at dusk so that no traveller is ever between shifts.

She is unglamorous about the work and exacting about it. She keeps a private file on every traveller currently mid-journey and reads them before she sleeps. Her measure of the studio is not the itinerary it sells but the hour after something breaks, and she has never accepted an explanation that began with the words nothing could be done.