How we curate
Someone went.
Someone went.
Then someone wrote it down.
Curation is the whole product, so it’s worth being specific about what it actually means here. This is how a guide gets made, step by step.
It starts with people, not pages
The core of every guide is access to people who have real, deep experience of a place — some of whom have worked in travel agencies themselves. They bring the one thing no amount of reading can replicate: judgment formed by going, not by aggregating other people's words.
Around that, we do the reading too. If someone is going to spend twenty hours and five hundred blog posts building a point of view on a country, better that it's us, once, and that the result is something you can actually use.
The process, every time
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01
Pick the destination on evidence
A small piece of market research first — what people are actually looking for, not what we feel like writing about.
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02
Decide which plans it deserves
Adventure, culture, foodie, nature — which kinds of trip this particular country genuinely does well, backed by the same research.
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03
Do our own research before talking to anyone
Forums, articles, social. Never arrive at an interview empty-handed: the point of the groundwork is to be able to ask a sharper question.
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04
Write the country layer
Visa, safety, customs, season, transport. The part that's true regardless of what kind of trip you take, written once.
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05
A different questionnaire for each person
Not one generic form sent to everyone. Someone who lived there for a year gives insider detail across every plan; someone who went with an agency tells us exactly what felt templated; someone who did one very specific trip often reveals a plan we hadn't thought of. Each conversation gets its own document and its own reason.
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06
Record the conversations
Always, where we can. Notes taken in the moment lose the nuance, and the nuance is usually the good part.
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07
Build the guide on the same three levels
Research plus interviews, structured the way every other guide is structured, so the quality doesn't depend on who was writing that week.
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08
Tune the voice to the plan
Adventure doesn't sound like culture, which doesn't sound like a party trip — while all of them still sound like us.
Two rules we hold to
If a place is beautiful and packed, we say so.
We don't hide the crowds to sell you the photo. You get the spot, the hour it's worth going, and the quieter alternative that gives you nearly the same thing — and if the experience behind a famous view is thin, we tell you that too. The photo and the truth, together.
And touristy isn't automatically out. A classic route being classic doesn't make it bad. Plenty of people want exactly the well-known experience, done properly. We decide whether something earns its place once we have all the information, not before.
Why few destinations, many plans
It would be easy to publish thin guides to fifty countries. It's much harder, and much more useful, to publish a small number that are genuinely worth paying for. So the catalogue grows slowly on purpose: a destination arrives when there's real knowledge behind it, not when there's a gap in a list.