Bellis is developing a direct-to-consumer travel experience platform to help local tourism businesses sell experiences and gift cards directly to travelers, solving the problem of high commissions, lost customer relationships, and generic discovery on traditional booking platforms — powered by low fees, strong data ownership, and an AI-driven discovery layer.
The tourism and experience economy is dominated by large global booking platforms and deal sites that take high commissions (often 15–30%), control customer data, and prioritize volume over relevance. For local hotels, inns, attractions, and experience providers, this results in shrinking margins, limited ownership of customer relationships, and heavy dependence on third-party platforms for visibility and sales.
At the same time, travelers face a different but related problem: discovering authentic, local experiences is surprisingly difficult. Recommendations are often generic, paid placements dominate results, and users must jump between many different platforms to plan a trip. The result is a disconnect between what travelers want — personal, meaningful experiences — and how experiences are distributed online today.
This problem affects a large and fragmented market: thousands of small and mid-sized tourism businesses across Denmark (and beyond), and millions of travelers each year looking for better inspiration and simpler booking flows. Despite digitalization, much of the value is extracted by intermediaries rather than staying with the local hosts who create the experiences.
Bellis solves this by acting as a direct booking and discovery layer between travelers and local hosts.
For travelers, Bellis is a single place to discover, save, and buy experiences and gift cards directly from hosts — without hidden markups or confusing redirects. Discovery is curated and increasingly personalized through an AI travel assistant that understands structured tourism data and recommends experiences based on interests, companions, timing, and location.
For hosts, Bellis is not a traditional OTA. There are no setup fees, subscriptions, or long-term lock-ins. Partners only pay a low transaction fee when they actually make a sale. Bellis provides the infrastructure — checkout, gift cards, partner dashboards, analytics, and server-side tracking — while hosts retain control over pricing, branding, and customer relationships.
A key part of the solution is measurement and data transparency. Bellis ensures that marketing and traffic can be tracked and optimized even when bookings happen in external systems, allowing partners to understand real performance and invest confidently in direct sales.
Bellis started from first-hand experience working closely with tourism businesses and seeing how much value was lost to intermediaries. Again and again, great local hosts struggled to make direct sales while paying high commissions to platforms that added little beyond distribution.
At the same time, as travelers ourselves, we felt how impersonal and repetitive travel discovery had become — even in a country full of unique places and passionate hosts. The inspiration came from Denmark’s Marguerite Route: guiding people away from the highways and toward hidden gems. Bellis is the digital version of that idea.
The motivation is simple: keep more value local, make discovery feel human again, and give both travelers and hosts tools that work in their favor — not against them.