What, or who, is the best resource for insider travel tips?
When we create a Slow Travel holiday and write a guide to accompany it, mostly the information we use is picked up on the ground. These guides tend to relate to small geographical areas. They are rural and off the beaten track, and there often isn’t a lot of information available online because of that. But finding out useful information for small rural areas is relatively easy. The problem comes when the focus is on big towns and cities. It takes a long time to get to know a city well. A few days hoofing it around is merely an appetiser, and a recipe for much wasted time unless considerable research is undertaken first.
When we were tasked with creating a gastronomic journey through Emilia Romagna, we used local specialists to show us around the culinary highlights of Bologna, Palma, Modena, and Reggio Emilia. As there was a specific theme, we didn’t have to know all there was to know about each city. I couldn’t write a travel guide to Bologna, but I can share many of the best places to try local specialities, and what those specialities are.
Putting together a Slow Travel itinerary for our own pleasure, involving a rail journey from Vienna to Berlin via Prague, highlighted a problem we face whenever planning visits to cities. What are the best resources for research?
Using travel guides and articles
At one time, before we were involved in the travel writing business, we’d pop into Waterstones to buy a Lonely Planet or Rough Guides. Not now. There’s nothing wrong with the information in these guides, or ones like them, but much of it I can find online. Basically, too many lack true insight – the juicy stuff. Sometimes that’s the fault of the format, sometimes it’s because authors have limited knowledge.
Travel articles in newspapers can prove a good source. Not tabloids though. They are awful for travel advice, puddle-deep in terms of useful information. Living in Portugal and Spain gave an insight into how various publications and writers cover destinations I know extremely well, and some are cringeworthy bad.
Broadsheets are better, but not without their flaws. I steer clear of blueprint travel articles. Travel writing relies on comped trips. It’s essential. But it does mean that what many writers are shown, and experience, is curated, so readers get a subjective picture of a destination. All travel writing is subjective, but there’s a difference between me forming my own views and having carefully packaged ones handed to me. That’s merely a form of marketing. On the face of it, ‘24/48 hours in…’ articles provide bite-sized recommendations. Yet I’m wary of those because of how they are compiled. Andy has written these for various publications, and there’s a weird thing that some editors do. They have a rigid blueprint they use whatever the destination. For example, Andy would receive a format for a city and asked to apply it to an island – a square peg in a round hole. Subsequently, a lot of these articles include suggestions that are completely illogical.
Best are insider guides to a destination. I don’t mean the ‘insiders’ whose knowledge comes from a fam trip lasting a few days. I mean people who live in a destination or, failing that, have spent a lot of time there. Broadsheets like The Guardian and Telegraph often have such articles. Even then there can be flaws. Local insiders can rave about trendy neighbourhoods. But, as a visitor staying for a few days in a city’s centre, I don’t really want to have to take a train journey to eat and drink. I found this problem with both Vienna and Prague. In one case, recommendations involved a thirty-minute train journey out of the city.
So, for both those cities, our tick list of things to see and do was cobbled together using various reliable sources.
Using specific writers
Berlin was different. Another way of finding useful information is knowing what travel writer/blogger to trust. There are travel writers I go to for various locations. Annie Bennett for the parts of Spain I’m not familiar with; Robin McKelvie for Scotland (although I’m Scottish, I never spent much time exploring my own country). And for Berlin, Kash Bhattacharya (aka Budget Traveller). I’ve known Kash for over a decade and trust his integrity, plus he lives in Berlin with his German partner. His tips don’t just involve the obvious big-hitter attractions (I can find those in two-minutes online), but true insider snippets, including the little things overlooked by many travel articles. One example involved Checkpoint Charlie being in the wrong place. We visited anyway, but with the knowledge we were viewing a tourist construct.
Using sources referenced above, we ended up with a frame made up of the things everybody knows to visit as well as some more obscure, insider tips. The meat isn’t put on the bones until we actually hoof it around a specific destination. When we started travel writing, some of our first commissions involved compiling ‘In Deep’ articles for Tenerife’s traditional towns. There wasn’t much written about these places at that time (2004), so we walked as many streets as we could, looking for potentially interesting things. That was our blueprint for exploring somewhere new; it’s never changed. Now it happens automatically, even when on holiday. In Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, we notched up more than 150km, much the same as if we were putting together a walking holiday.
With four days in each, we were never going get to know individual cities well. But we did stumble across little things we didn’t know about beforehand – a full-sized plane with butterfly wings on the side of a building and an alchemist bar selling drinks that billowed smoked in Prague; portable gardens and space invaders quietly taking over Vienna; a beach in a shopping centre and a mechanical pterodactyl up an alley in Berlin.
The are hardly travel ‘wows,’ but there’s still great pleasure in stumbling across things we didn’t know about beforehand.
