Hicham Alaoui arrived at Harvard Business School in 2012 after spending four years at Google. He’d worked on several marketing projects between California and Singapore at the tech giant, and this was going to be his second stint at an Ivy League school.

It would also be where he would eventually meet his future cofounder, Ghassan Rachid.

Rachid had arrived in Boston at HBS the year before after roles at Morgan Stanley and McKinsey, and the two naturally connected as Moroccan compatriots–Alaoui from Casablanca and Rachid from Rabat.

Like many MBA students they spent plenty of time talking about what kind of businesses they might build one day, but travel was not part of the conversation.

"We were brainstorming in arenas that had nothing to do with travel whatsoever," Alaoui recalled in a video interview.

Insurance. Real estate. Education. Entertainment…"We were all over the place, bouncing ideas off the wall."

At one point a few classmates were curious to visit Morocco, and they asked the two to organize a trip.

That request would eventually become Experience Morocco, then grow into what is today The Travel Collection, a global network of destination management companies.

Along the way it would reveal something larger about luxury and travel itself. Despite being a massive global industry , many parts of the industry at-large remain fragmented , relationship-driven, undigitized and difficult to scale from country to country.

But for motivated entrepreneurs that are willing to put in the work, it represents an opportunity as a hidden asset class which in the last two years has attracted almost $11 billion of investment in travel tech alone.

The first version of the business looked less like a startup and more like a student club.

At Harvard, Alaoui and Rachid were asked to organize what business schools often call a "trek," a group trip designed to expose students to a particular country or industry.

Since they grew up and knew the country, the pair took the lead and began researching local tour operators in Morocco.

At the time they didn’t even know the term “Destination Management Company,” or DMC in industry jargon.

In luxury travel, DMCs function as local experts. They help arrange guides, transportation, hotels, restaurant reservations and design specialized experiences.

Luxury travel advisors, meanwhile, act as trusted intermediaries for affluent travelers, helping clients plan and book complex trips while relying on DMCs as their boots on the ground to flawlessly execute these trips locally.

"We didn't even know what a DMC was," Alaoui joked. "We just called them travel agencies back then."

However, when the proposals came back about what they should see and do in Morocco, Alaoui and Rachid found themselves as frustrated as they were disappointed.

"What we got back just didn't hit the mark," Alaoui said. "There was no creativity. Value for money wasn't what we thought it should have been. Logistics didn't seem like they were going to be that smooth…"

"And we had our personal brands at stake," he explained. "These were our friends from business school, and it might be their only time in their lives to visit Morocco."

So Alaoui and Rachid decided to build the trip themselves. But before they booked anything, Alaoui hosted an information session on campus.

In his version of the classic American lemonade stand, he served Moroccan tea and cookies, walked classmates through the proposed itinerary and announced that registration would open the following week with a $500 non-refundable deposit.

He initially thought 40 slots was ambitious and that they’d perhaps get a dozen sign-ups, but what happened next surprised everyone.

“I remember the exact moment when we realized this could be what we’d been looking for, because we sold out 85 spots in under two minutes," he said. "We thought we might fill one bus, but then the question became, ‘why not two?’"

Given the demand the two scrambled to add another vehicle, and the additional seats disappeared just as quickly.

That was the moment they realized they might be looking at something bigger than just a school trip.

Experience Morocco officially launched in 2013, but the road to recognition was meandering and uphill.

Initially the founders used their MBA groups as a proving ground for their experiences. Large student trips allowed them to test logistics, get feedback from an intelligent peer group, refine operations and build relationships with hotels and local partners without the pressure of serving high-stakes clients.

It was a smart move because Harvard students tend to come from affluent families, they represent a group that tends to be discerning about business models as well as experiences, and there’s a promising chance that these individuals (and perhaps even their businesses) would turn into future clientele.

Eventually, Alaoui and Rachid discovered Zicasso, a platform that connects wealthy travelers with travel agencies and DMCs, and then realized that their model would have to scale far beyond student groups.

The direction was clear: move deeper into luxury. It might be higher stakes, but it also promised higher rewards. However, that transition required more than better hotels–it required learning how the luxury travel industry actually works.

Affluent travelers value time, and tend not to book complex, multi-country itineraries directly or without assistance. Instead, many rely on luxury travel advisors–trusted professionals who function almost like chiefs of staff for travel, and often a lot more than that.

But let’s take a second to bring this into crystal clear focus.

When an ordinary person hears the terms “lifestyle management” or “lifestyle concierge” they’re probably thinking about an agency that covers business meetings and dry cleaning.

But often, the league I’m talking about here is the one where advisors are arranging Emirati royal weddings, flying the whole Broadway cast and crew of The Lion King to Africa to do a private performance in the actual Serengeti, or coordinating which multi-million pieces of art a client bought at the Grand Prix need to go in Villas A-through-G across the globe within the next two weeks.

While these examples represent an extreme part of the market, they highlight the level of demand coming from the wealthy–one that’s been shifting from goods to experiences .

Generally it’s estimated that professional advisors book travel worth hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

Naturally, one of the most important aspects of this role is orchestrating for wealthy clients where they want to be and how best to get there.

To do that, advisors manage relationships with hotels, private aviators, cruises and other so-called “suppliers” to solve problems and curate experiences for clients whose time is more valuable than the cost of the trip itself.

For Alaoui and Rachid, winning over those advisors, who are effectively gatekeepers for the rich, proved far harder than winning over fellow Harvard classmates.

Alaoui spent years crisscrossing the United States attending trade shows, roadshows and other luxury events in an attempt to gain traction.

"There was a chunk of my life where my life was like fly into a city, rent a Nissan Maxima, drive around for four days, fly to another city, rent another Nissan Maxima," he recalled.

"In some cases there are travel advisors I met three years in a row before they gave me business," he said.

"The first year it's, 'Nice to meet you, but you'll probably be out of business in a year.' The second year it's, 'Okay, you're still in business.' After three years it's, 'Fine, here's a client. Show me what you can do.'"

Those years taught the founders something that would later shape the entire company–that trust was their most important currency.

Like most travel businesses, Experience Morocco faced a sudden existential crisis. The pandemic brought global travel to a halt and forced the founders to reassess what they had built.

"On the surface the biggest value we had built could seem like it was Moroccan, but it was actually not," Alaoui said. "It was about understanding this world of travel advisors, gaining their trust, and understanding what it takes to serve them and their clients successfully."

The strongest validation they’d received was from advisors themselves, as well as from professional trade organizations such as the prominent U.S.-based advisor consortium, Virtuoso.

“What's been most impressive about Hicham and the growth of The Travel Collection is how they've managed to do what most companies find challenging in expansion–be in more places, but have each place feel local,” wrote Henley Vasquez via email, a co-founder of Fora Travel, one of TIME’s top 100 most influential companies of 2026.

That company, which was founded in 2021, has reportedly sold more than $2.5 billion in travel and in April 2025 raised $60 million of investment.

“Hicham used his learnings from Morocco to seed talented GMs and local teams in each expansion market, resulting in a powerful collection around the world,” she added.

After years of building the company, Alaoui noticed that conversations increasingly drifted beyond Morocco since advisors who trusted the company in one destination wanted recommendations elsewhere.

Those requests revealed a gap in the market because advisors were looking for trusted partners capable of delivering a consistent experience across multiple destinations, regulatory environments, and across borders.

The other option is partnering, but various DMCs have different workflows, and advisors have to restart the process of relationship building when sending a client to a new destination.

Instead of partnering with a loose network of companies that have different workflows and cultures, Alaoui and Rachid began building integrated local operations with a common framework.

Funny enough, the challenge was proving the business model could travel.

To prepare, the two created an unusual and intentionally intense onboarding (and vetting) process.

New general managers (GMs) spend three months training in Morocco before launching replicants of the business in their home countries.

The goal was to develop local expertise while maintaining consistent standards, workflows and tech stacks across the network–essential components for maintaining relationships with travel advisors.

The first expansion was Italy–a deliberate choice not just because it consistently ranks as a top destination every year, but because it’s one of the toughest markets.

Rather than expanding into culturally adjacent destinations such as Tunisia, Egypt or the United Arab Emirates, the founders wanted to test whether their model could succeed in one of the most competitive luxury destinations in the world, as Italy reportedly has more than 250 DMCs.

Their first GM “graduated” in late 2022 and opened up shop in Italy in early 2023. Fast forward just three years to today and their company, The Travel Collection, now operates 16 different DMCs on six continents.

The founders also made a deliberate decision about incentives.

Many multi-country travel companies reward local leaders based primarily on the performance of their own destination, but Alaoui wanted something different.

Some companies, he explained, give local general managers an ownership stake in their individual businesses. By contrast, The Travel Collection grants equity in the international parent company.

That might seem like a trivial distinction, but Alaoui believes it changes behavior.

"We don't want our Australian GM incentivized on just Australia," he said. "We want our GMs incentivized on the global success of this adventure."

"We are only successful if everyone is," said Chief Commercial Officer Milena Stancati of the resulting organizational culture.

The challenge now is convincing advisors that a multi-country network does not have to come at the expense of local authenticity.

That concern is shared by DMC specialists.

Becky Harris, founder of Travel Kinship and The Compass Room, a B2B marketing and representation consultancy for travel, said the kind of experiential travel she most wants to see grow is difficult to commercialize without losing part of what makes it valuable.

Historically speaking, “The minute you start to try to scale too much it loses its quality,” Harris said in a video interview.

“All these trendy phrases like ‘experiential’ and ‘authentic’ travel…we’ve been doing it for 20 years. It’s just now they’ve got a marketing term for it,” she said referring to trends in travel marketing.

Still, she added that if a model like The Travel Collection helps advisors create more interesting, locally-rooted trips more easily it could move the industry in the right direction.

Alaoui and Rachid’s story reflects broader changes taking place across luxury, and the travel industry at-large.

The financial and technological challenges that have faced the industry now represent an opportunity for motivated entrepreneurs who are coming into it with fresh eyes.

And for good reason. The travel sector is projected to grow to $15 trillion by 2040 according to Boston Consulting Group .

Similarly, American Express Global Business Travel agreed in May to an approximate $6.3 billion acquisition backed by Long Lake, General Catalyst and Alpha Wave, a bet that highlights the growing value investors place on travel platforms, networks and infrastructure.

While high-end travel is built on relationships, trust and local expertise, it’s still a sector that has significant room for innovation.

All fires start small so they say, and today all it takes is the slightest little spark–even if it comes with something as simple as tea, cookies and a sign-up sheet.

Find Jacques Ledbetter on LinkedIn . Visit his website .