Packzup is a travel blog about the places the guidebooks skip. We write for travelers who don’t want a curated list of Europe’s top five capitals. We write for people planning a slow four-day kitesurfing trip to a village with no paved roads, a weekend drive to a ski resort their city friends have never heard of, or the Ceará coastline that Brazilian tourists keep to themselves.
What Packzup is
Packzup covers underrated and offbeat destinations around the world with practical, first-hand travel guides. Every post tries to answer the questions you actually type into Google: how do I get there, how much does it cost, when should I go, what will I wish I’d known before leaving. We don’t do superlatives for the sake of them. We don’t pad word counts with generic "top 10 reasons to travel" fluff. If a destination isn’t worth visiting, we say so.
Who writes here
John Morrison is the lead writer at Packzup. He’s been traveling off the typical tourist map for the past decade — from the sand-bound fishing villages of northeast Brazil to the lesser-known ski country of the American Rockies and the Appalachians. He writes the kind of guide he wishes he’d had on his own first trip to each place: specific, current, honest about tradeoffs.
Packzup is independent. We’re not owned by a tour operator, a booking conglomerate, or a media group. We use affiliate links for some hotels and experiences (clearly disclosed), but we don’t take sponsored content or let money decide what we recommend.
What you’ll find here
- Destination guides with real pricing, transfer routes, and where to stay
- Comparison posts when two places are routinely confused (Jericoacoara vs Canoa Quebrada, one Colorado ski resort vs another) so you pick correctly
- Practical logistics — the bus schedule, the ATM situation, the last-jardineira-out-of-town kind of detail that guidebooks skip
- Seasonal updates — we update our ski and beach content every year because prices and conditions change
How we decide what to cover
We focus on three conditions for any destination we write about:
- It’s underrated relative to how good it is — meaning most travelers overlook it in favor of better-known alternatives
- There’s enough tourism infrastructure that the average reader can actually visit (not just adventurers with local contacts)
- We either have first-hand experience there or direct input from operators and travelers on the ground
Editorial principles
- Current pricing or we don’t publish it. If a post hasn’t been updated in a season, we pull it for review.
- No AI-generated filler. Every article is written or heavily edited by hand.
- Disclosed affiliate links. We mark sponsored links with
rel="sponsored"so you know what’s commission-paying and what isn’t. - Typos get fixed fast. If you spot one, email us — we care.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or an underrated destination you think we should cover? Send us a note. We read everything.