About JOLI

JOLI is for people who care what they're searching for and how a place feels. Not always the highest rated. Not the most reviewed. The right one. The small hotel built into a hillside. The restaurant the locals actually go to. The walk you would never find if you were glued to your phone. That's the kind of recommendation we're trying to give - a well-travelled friend giving you advice over dinner. The kind of friend who's been everywhere and loves to make recommendations.

That's how we built JOLI. It's tech-driven, but streamlined and audited in a way that should feel like a friend giving you advice. You might argue a large language model could research a trip for you - but the measure of taste is in how we've designed JOLI. It listens to each particular search, programmed through our own parameters for what we think is good and what kind of place we want to push. There's a niche framework around the broad reach of AI, and it's that lens that captures the information we want to convey to our travellers.

The work of curation - the reading, the visiting, the saying no to ninety-nine things - is the art of the edit. That is the service we pride ourselves on providing.

The internet is becoming oversaturated to a point where it is truly overwhelming, and AI is only adding to that. A million different platforms released daily, and we're constantly glued to our phones. More often than not it's the last place we want to be. The whole point of this technology, originally, was for it to work in the background so we weren't glued to our screens.

That's part of the JOLI ethos: a tech-powered product that gets you to the thing you want by really listening, so you can actually go out and enjoy the world.

Algorithms only rank what already exists, by criteria that have flattened everything into the same recognisable shape. There's no human element in sight. We bring that human element back, and use AI where it genuinely helps - to listen, to remember what you said and what you like through your taste profile. It's not data farming. It's using your preferences to frame the search, and we're upfront about that.

The idea for JOLI came to me halfway up a mountain in the Austrian Alps, in a valley in Kärnten I used to visit as a child. My mother is German, and we'd go there to see my grandparents. Returning as an adult many years later, I was looking up at this beautiful, untouched valley, and I realised I only knew it because of my family - because people I am most connected with passed on this knowledge.

Nothing online would have led me there. And that, to me, is the pinnacle of recommendation: the network effect of word of mouth.

The places that had shaped my best trips - the small hotels, the restaurants without websites, the conversations with hosts, the villages that didn't photograph well but had the best food - were precisely the places the internet was worst at recommending.

So I set out to build the thing I'd been wishing I had access to when traveling. A tool that treats travellers as the curious, discerning people they are. JOLI simply uses the best of new technology without losing the things only a human eye can see.

I'm Jim Turnbull-Walter, and I run JOLI from London. I work within a small network of designers, writers and collaborators who share the conviction that travel can still be quietly extraordinary if you know where to look.