Adwoa M.
Founded Emba. Specialises in long-form bespoke trips, particularly Italy, Japan, and East Africa. Reads on planes, never sleeps on them.
01 — The story
Started in 2014 because booking a trip had become awful.
Twelve years in
The founder of Emba was once trying to plan a honeymoon and couldn't find a single agency that would do anything other than email her PDFs of resort packages. She built the trip herself, regretted several of the bookings, and came back convinced there was a different way to do this. Emba is what she wishes had existed then: a small studio that treats every trip as a writing project before it becomes a logistics one.
We are intentionally small. One person is on your file from first conversation through landing back — not a "client services manager", not a chatbot. We do not take commission from hotels (it would compromise which one we recommend). We do not run sales. We do not have a marketing budget. Most of our work comes from clients who have travelled with us before. The rest from one of them telling someone else.
What we believe — that the best trips are written, not assembled. That a quiet hotel in the right neighbourhood beats a famous hotel in the wrong one. That someone who has actually slept in the bed knows things a brochure never will. That nobody on holiday should be solving problems in the middle of the night. That money spent on the right trip outlasts money spent on the wrong one.
