Melissa Haymerle

There is a version of Melissa Haymerle that existed before the children, before Switzerland, before Numinous Sights — and understanding her is probably the fastest way to understand the business she built.

She bought a one-way ticket to East Africa in her twenties and figured out the return journey later. She hiked to Machu Picchu not because it was on a list but because the idea of standing there felt necessary. She found her way to Lizard Island off the coast of Queensland — one of the most remote stretches of the Great Barrier Reef — and spent time there in the particular silence that only genuinely hard-to-reach places produce.

She was not, in other words, the kind of traveller who booked things a year in advance and read the reviews twice.

The instinct was always to go further, stay longer, and trust that the logistics would resolve themselves somewhere between the airport and the destination. They usually did.

Professionally, she spent years in sales — recruiting services — which is a career that teaches you, above everything else, how to listen to what someone actually needs rather than what they think they're asking for. It is, as it turns out, exactly the skill that travel design requires.

Melissa is Swiss and Venezuelan, her husband Austrian. Their family is, by nature, international — shaped by different languages, different relationships to home, and a shared conviction that the world is best understood from inside it rather than at a distance. They are based in Küssnacht am Rigi, in the heart of Switzerland, which is a beautiful place to return to and a terrible place to stay put for long.

When the children arrived — two of them, at different ages and with different temperaments — the travel didn't stop. It changed. The one-way tickets gave way to more considered planning. The solo instinct became a family conversation. But the underlying belief — that the most worthwhile destinations are rarely the most obvious ones, and that children are far more capable of the world than the travel industry gives them credit for — never shifted.

Numinous Sights is not a pivot away from the person she was. It is what that person became once she had something more important to travel for.

She designs journeys for families who recognise something of themselves in that description — drawn to the world, honest about the complexity of getting there with children, and unwilling to settle for a version of travel that asks them to leave their curiosity at the departure gate.

Switzerland is home. The wanderlust, as anyone who knows her will confirm, has never once shown any sign of stopping.