The Art of Arrival: Why we started sora.

Honestly, writing this first post feels a little weird.

After 6 cups of coffee this morning, 12 “What makes a good first blog post?” blogs and countless hovers over the ‘Post’ button, we done it. It’s live. Can’t take it back. We’ll we can delete it to be fair, but we won’t. We aren’t ‘travel bloggers’ by any stretch of the imagination. We don’t have a perfectly curated Instagram grid of açai bowls. We don’t even really know how to use TikTok properly. We’re just two people who realised that planning a trip has somehow, over the years, become harder than actually going on one.

You know the routine. You search for a destination and get bombarded by endless, AI-generated "Top 10" lists that all recommend the same three tourist traps. So you give up, close the laptop and head to the high street instead. Listen, we get the point of the high street travel agencies. They have their use. If you want a seat on a plane for a good price, they work. We aren't against them. It is just not us, and increasingly it is not for others either. We are for the people trying to avoid the 6am flight time, the 45-minute walk to the city centre, or the "4-star" hotel with 6/10 reviews. Yes, those exist - we’ve stayed in some…Budapest, we’re looking at you!

We know most people don't build complex 'Rain Man'-like systems to navigate this mess. We're nerds though, so we do.

We realised we’ve been acting as the 'travel advisor' for our social circle for years, and we love it. We have learned from our own experiences and years of research to build something that fixes the gaps. This is about giving you that specific feeling of contentment when you put your bags down. No friction. No, “Oh, I hope we picked the right hotel!” panic. Just the confidence that it has been handled.

The truth is, sora. has been in our heads for the best part of a decade. Pre-Covid, we actually built a fully functioning website (it is absolutely mental that was 7 years ago!). We might share some screenshots of this someday if we’re feeling like we want to be humbled. Looking back it was genuinely tragic, so maybe not.

Then the world stopped. Travel changed. Restrictions and legal minefields muddied the waters of what we wanted to do. It’s been a long, messy road of false starts to get here. But through all the delays, we kept doing what we’ve always done. Saving random unknown cafes, pinning street art locations, and obsessing over hotel lobbies we would love to one day stay in. Now we are in a place where we are really proud of what we have built, and looking forward to the road (and no doubt challenges) ahead.

This journal is going to be where we dump our brains; unpolished notes on places we love, rants about hotel design, and probably some mistakes we have made on our journeys along the way. We’re figuring this part out as we go. But one thing is for sure, we are so excited to bring sora. to you!

Thanks for being here early. Sign up to our newsletter to be the first to read when we post our next ramble.

— L & C

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