We started ODIA becauseI ran a DMCand watched it nearly break me.
A love letter to the people who make travel actually happen.
I run a luxury DMC across France and Switzerland. And for years, I was drowning. Not because of bad clients. Not because I didn't love the work — I loved the work. Because of everything around it.
Proposals that took half a day to build. Supplier emails I wasn't sure I'd sent. Group itineraries assembled in Excel at 1am. The constant low-grade fear that one thing — just one thing — could fall through the cracks and ruin a client's entire journey. I had built a business I was proud of, and I spent most of my time just trying to keep track of it.
So I looked for software. Real software, built for how a DMC actually works. I found tools for hotels, tools for tour operators, tools for travel agents — tools adapted from other industries and sold to us as close enough. Nothing built for how a destination management company actually operates.
So I called my brother Sami. We didn't start with a pitch deck or a market thesis. We started with me walking him through my actual day — every pain point, every workaround, every thing I wished existed. We built that.
Eighteen months later, our clients are building proposals in thirty minutes. They're handling double the journeys with the same team. They're closing their laptops at the end of the day. And every time someone says this is exactly what I needed, I feel it — because I know exactly what they mean.
If you run a DMC and you're tired of duct-taping your operations together with spreadsheets and prayers — this is for you. We built it because no one else would.
Elbia & Sami
Co-founders
Our thesis
Travel operations is infrastructure, not paperwork.
- 01Journeys are live objects. — Not static PDFs. A lodge change propagates through the itinerary, the invoice, the supplier contract, and the agent portal — simultaneously.
- 02AI should disappear. — It drafts the first version. You decide the final one. Your voice, your brand, your margin. Nobody at ODIA thinks AI replaces a travel designer.
- 03Agents are partners. — Not a cc line on an email. A real portal with real-time pricing, honest commission visibility, and the tools to sell your journeys as well as you do.
- 04Operations is a design surface. — The quality of a journey lives in the ops — the timing, the accuracy, the care behind every confirmation. We put it at the center of the product, not in a dashboard.
A small team, a clear taste, and a very long list of operators we will not let down.
We are a small founding team — and we plan to stay lean on purpose. We ship new features every week. We don't believe in travel hackathons or launch weeks. We believe in the slow, careful work of making a single customer wildly successful, then the next one.
Built from inside the industry.
- 2022
The problem was personal
Elbia had spent years running a luxury DMC across France and Switzerland. She knew exactly where the hours went: disconnected tools, manual proposals, commission disputes, supplier confirmations lost in inboxes. The software the industry offered wasn't built by people who'd ever run a program. She called her brother Sami.
- 2023
The first version
Sami built. Elbia tested it on her own agency, Be Essential Club. No investors, no runway — just two people who understood the problem well enough to solve it. The first operators who saw it didn't wait to be sold. They asked when they could use it.
- 2024
Word of mouth
We never ran a campaign. Operators talked to other operators. The platform grew through referrals from people who'd seen what it could do. We kept building — proposals, itineraries, supplier management, commission tracking, agent collaboration — and we kept funding it ourselves, because we didn't want anyone else deciding what to build.
- 2025
A deliberate choice
We had investment conversations. We said no. Full ownership meant full focus on the people actually using the product. By the time we opened Odia to the wider market at the end of 2025, we already had operators who'd been with us for over a year.
- 2026
The network is growing
New agencies onboard every week. Word still travels faster than our marketing. We're visible at the industry events that matter, and the operators finding us are the ones who were already looking for something better.
- What's next
Travel agents have been asking about Odia since the beginning — because the industry doesn't work in silos, and neither should the software. A dedicated travel agent platform is coming soon. Then suppliers. Then hotels. The vision was always one unified operating system for the entire bespoke travel industry. We're building it, one piece at a time.