There’s a word for the hour before a place decides what it wants to be. In Kapampangan, it’s alaya: dawn, and east, the direction the sun chooses first. It’s also, as it turns out, the right name for a company built by two people who have spent more of their adult lives boarding planes than staying home.
Welcome to Alaya. We’re a curated travel company designing small-group and private journeys across Asia, and we exist to solve one very specific problem: the trip that looks perfect in photos and leaves you feeling like you saw everything and experienced nothing.
What Alaya Actually Is
Alaya designs small-group and fully private journeys, from rugged outdoor expeditions to unhurried cultural discovery trips, bespoke itineraries, and wellness retreats. The idea is simple, and we think a little rare in this industry: every trip should teach you something about life, or feel like a retreat.
That’s not a tagline we bolted on afterward. It’s the actual filter every itinerary has to pass before it becomes a trip we’re willing to put our name on.
What makes Alaya different:
- Small by design. Capped group sizes, always. Intimacy here isn’t a marketing word, it’s a hard limit we hold to.
- Considered, not rushed. Fewer stops, longer stays. The itinerary has room to breathe.
- Curated, not catalogued. Every trip is hand-built by people who’ve actually been there, not assembled from a supplier catalog.
- Local and real. Real guides, real hosts, real relationships, not a scripted “cultural experience.”
- A line for every appetite. Rugged or restful, group or private, adventure or stillness. Alaya meets you where you are.
Four Ways to Travel With Alaya
Alaya isn’t one kind of trip. It’s four, each built for a different appetite.
Alaya Journeys is for the traveler who wants depth without difficulty. These are cultural, city, and countryside discovery tours at an unhurried pace, across places like Laos, Myanmar, Japan, and South Korea.
Alaya Expeditions is for the traveler who wants dirt on their boots and altitude in their lungs. Think rugged, outdoor-led group tours: mountaineering, trekking, desert crossings, wildlife encounters.
Alaya Retreats is for the traveler who wants to travel inward, too. These are wellness and spiritually-oriented trips built around yoga, meditation, and health.
Alaya Reserve is for those who want it entirely on their own terms: fully private, custom-planned itineraries for individuals, couples, families, or groups who want the whole thing built around them.
Put simply: Expeditions for the body. Journeys for the senses. Reserve for your own story. Retreats for the self.
Why We Built This
Alaya is run by two best friends. Merald spends his weekdays as an operations head in tech, the version of himself that plans, systemizes, and makes sure things run on schedule. Mirjan spends hers in the aisle of an airplane, the person who has seen more airports and more time zones than almost anyone else in the room.
Between the two of us, we’ve done the fast trip, the big-bus tour, the itinerary crammed with landmarks and light on memory. We kept noticing the same gap: the trips that actually changed us were never the ones that moved the fastest. They were the ones where we stayed a little longer, wandered a little further off the main road, and let a place teach us something instead of just showing it to us.
Alaya is that gap, built into a company.
Our First Trip: Luminous Laos
The first Alaya Journeys departure is Luminous Laos, a five-day, four-night route through Vientiane, Vang Vieng, and Luang Prabang, led in person by both of us. Expect a cooking class in Vientiane, a hot air balloon ride over the limestone karsts in Vang Vieng, and a rice farming morning in Luang Prabang that has nothing to do with a photo op and everything to do with actually working the field for a few hours.
Join our upcoming Luminous Laos trip
Who Alaya Is For
Alaya is built with a specific traveler in mind: professionals in their 30s and 40s who’ve spent years watching the world through a screen and a window seat, who don’t have unlimited leave to spend, and who are tired of trips that feel like a checklist. For Filipino professionals especially, that limited leave has to count for something more than a photo dump.
But Alaya was never meant to stay small in spirit, only in group size. If you recognize yourself in any of the above, wherever you’re reading this from, this is for you too. And through Alaya Reserve, families and private groups can apply the whole philosophy entirely on their own terms.
A Few Questions You Might Have
How is Alaya different from a regular tour package? Regular tour packages are usually built to move a large group through as many stops as possible. Alaya caps group sizes on purpose, builds fewer stops into more time, and works with real local hosts rather than a supplier catalog.
Where does Alaya operate? The first destinations are Laos, Myanmar, Mongolia, Borneo, and Timor-Leste, with more added as new ground relationships are built. Alaya Reserve trips can be built almost anywhere.
Can I book a fully private trip instead of a group tour? Yes. That’s exactly what Alaya Reserve is for: individuals, couples, families, or groups who want a custom itinerary built entirely around them.
Come Dwell With Us
Follow the day-to-day at @alayatours on Instagram and Facebook. If Luminous Laos or any of the four lines above sound like the trip you’ve been trying to describe to your friends for years, this is where that trip actually gets built.
Learn a little, live a little.
— Merald & Mirjan, Alaya