How we curate

Why we curate

Travel advice is a firehose. Search for any trip and what comes back is a wall: SEO articles written for other SEO articles, listicles that are neither ten nor hidden, and newsletters that arrive daily whether or not anything happened. None of it is wrong, exactly. It's just not for you — a feed optimises for engagement, and engagement is what happens to you while you're trying to decide something else.

So we stopped searching and started structuring. Instead of asking "what does the internet recommend?", we decided whose taste we trust before we needed them — and made that decision once, deliberately, in a form a system can use. Every source below earned its place; nothing is here because an algorithm surfaced it.

The steps

1. Collect — every candidate source goes into one register: tour operators, travel writers, editorial guides. One folder per source, holding what we actually know about them — who they serve, how they travel, what their catalogue really contains. Trips are extracted into structured data, not bookmarks: hundreds of real itineraries, queryable.
2. Score — each source is weighed against a written taste rubric: travel style, comfort level, pace, the kind of traveller they build for. The rubric is versioned — when our taste sharpens, the scores are re-run, not argued about.
3. Decide — a human call, on evidence: trust it, pass on it, or watch it. Passing is as valuable as trusting; a declared "not for us" keeps the firehose out permanently. Only sources that clear the bar appear on this site.
4. Revisit — scores age. Operators change catalogues, review counts move, newsletters go quiet. The register is re-checked and re-scored on a rhythm, so a recommendation here reflects the current source, not the one we met two years ago.

The honest caveat

This is our door policy, built around how we like to travel. A source that didn't clear our bar may be perfect for you — the point isn't that these are the best sources, it's that they're deliberately chosen ones, and that you can do the same with yours. The method is the recommendation; the list is just ours.

See the sources this produced →