Elude: Budget-First Travel Booking

Elude, a Los Angeles travel startup founded by Alex Simon and Frankie Scerbo, inverted the booking search. Instead of asking where you want to go, it asks what you can spend — say $2,000, leaving from Paris, October 14 to 16, two adults — and returns destinations with a flight and a hotel bundled inside that budget. Only hotels rated 3.5 stars and above make the cut.

Elude raised a $2.1M seed round led by Mucker Capital and had 40,000 people on the waitlist ahead of its August 2021 launch. The product design came from Elude’s team; we built the mobile app.

The search form is four fields: total budget on a slider, departure city, dates, passengers. Everything downstream carries that context in a persistent header — $2,000 · Oct 14–16 · 2 passengers — so a traveller can back out of a hotel and pick another without losing the frame.

Results are a shortlist of destinations with a running total: Milan, two nonstop legs plus a night at the Meliá Milano, $695 for a two-day trip. Flight options separate departure and return; hotels can be browsed as a list or on a map, with price deltas against the currently selected stay. The order summary puts flights, room, rate and passengers on one screen with a single continue-to-pay action.

Elude launched publicly on 5 August 2021 with the app we built, and went on to raise a further $3 million for the budget-based booking model.

Bundled flight-and-hotel results and a persistent budget header turned a comparison problem into a one-screen decision — which was the point of the product.