About Packzup
Packzup is an independent travel publication run by a small editorial team. We publish first-hand destination guides for the places we think most travellers under-rate, under-time, or pick for the wrong reasons. The brand tagline isn’t marketing copy — it’s the test we use on every piece we publish. Real pricing. Real routes. Real advice.
What that means in practice: we’d rather publish twenty deeply-researched guides a year than two hundred shallow ones. We’d rather tell you that Pamukkale is overrated than write a glowing piece because the tourism board offered a press trip. We’d rather give you a balanced verdict on the balloon ride at Cappadocia than oversell the experience because the affiliate commission is good.
What Packzup is for
The travel-content internet is broken in two specific ways. The first is AI-generated filler — thin pages written by an algorithm that’s never been anywhere, optimised for keywords no traveller actually types. The second is influencer-driven promotion — aspirational photography over substance, sponsored content disguised as recommendation, and a relentless "every place is amazing" voice that’s genuinely unhelpful when you’re trying to plan a trip.
We sit between those two extremes. The voice on every page is the voice of someone who’s actually been there. The advice is specific enough to act on. The pricing in our guides matches what you’ll actually pay. When something is overrated, we say so. When a famous attraction is genuinely worth the queue, we say that too.
John Morrison is the founder and lead travel writer at Packzup. Over the past decade he has explored destinations across six continents, with a particular focus on the offbeat regions that traditional travel media skim past: the Caucasus, Central Asia, the southern Italian Mezzogiorno, the inland Balkans, eastern Anatolia, and the second cities of Latin America. He writes most of the destination guides on the site.
Drew Treasury is a contributing travel writer at Packzup, specialising in city culture, food markets, street art, and neighbourhood travel. Drew covers urban destinations across Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Drew’s pieces are the ones that go deep on a single neighbourhood or a specific food scene rather than surveying a city as a whole.
How we work
Every Packzup guide is built from first-hand visits. We don’t rewrite Lonely Planet. We don’t aggregate from Reddit. We don’t accept paid placements that aren’t clearly marked. When a piece is supported by a sponsor or includes an affiliate link, the disclosure is visible on the page where the recommendation appears, not buried in a footer.
Where we use AI: for editing, fact-checking, and pulling together the kind of structured data (weather averages, currency conversions, sunrise times) that’s easier to compile programmatically. Where we don’t use AI: writing the actual prose. The voice on every page is human, the recommendations are human, the opinions are human. Programmatic data, hand-written editorial.
What we publish
Our content sits in three layers. The top layer is the destination guides — long-form pieces on individual cities and regions, written from first-hand experience and updated as the place changes. Below that are the support pages: seasonal guides for specific months, comparisons between destinations, packing and itinerary advice. At the foundation are the regional pillars — broader pieces that frame how to think about a continent or sub-region.
We don’t publish daily news, deal hunting, or aspirational travel imagery. We don’t do listicles for the algorithm. We’d rather have the right page when you search for what to do in Tbilisi in April than the most pages.
What we don’t do
We don’t take press trips from tourism boards in exchange for coverage. We don’t monetise through pop-up ads or auto-playing video. We don’t use affiliate cloaking that hides commercial relationships. We don’t recycle content under different titles for SEO. We don’t pretend a city is "up-and-coming" just because it’s under-covered — sometimes there are real reasons it’s under-covered, and we’ll tell you those reasons too.
How to use us
Most readers find us through specific search queries: cappadocia in october, things to do in oaxaca, best time to visit bali. That’s by design. We write each guide assuming you’re actively planning a trip and need to make decisions today, not browsing aspirationally. Subscribe to the monthly digest if you want a slower drip of new guides as we publish them.
If there’s a destination you wish we covered, write in. If you spot an error in a guide, write in. We update our content as places change, prices change, and our own thinking changes. The pages here aren’t static.
Contact: editorial@packzup.com. Press and partnerships: same address. Corrections: same address with "Correction" in the subject.