Most travel content is written from one of two places: the press trip, where the writer is being paid to be enthusiastic, or the influencer feed, where the writer is being paid to be aspirational. Both are honest forms of marketing. Neither is honest travel writing.

The version we believe in is older. It was practical, observational, occasionally cranky. It told you that the famous beach was crowded and the second one over was empty. It told you that the bus took six hours, not four. It told you that the famous restaurant was closed for a renovation that had been going on for two years. The good travel writing came from people who had nothing to sell except their attention.

This is what Packzup is, structurally and editorially.

The traveller we write for

We write for the person who has somewhere between five and twenty travel days a year, who pays for their own flights, who would rather take a slower route to a better trip than the fastest route to a famous one. We write for the person who has been disappointed by a destination at least once and learned that the disappointment was usually about the version of the place that was sold to them, not the place itself.

That traveller doesn’t need to be told that Bali has nice beaches or that Paris has good restaurants. They need to know: which beaches, which restaurants, when, with what trade-offs, at what cost. They need the practical second sentence after the headline. We try to write the practical second sentence.

What we mean by “offbeat”

Offbeat is overused. We don’t mean places that aren’t on the map. Every city we cover has been on the map for centuries. We mean places where the second version — the version that exists outside the algorithm’s tourist circuit — is significantly better than the first. Tbilisi outside the Old Town. Cappadocia outside the balloon-photo half-hour. Paris outside the Eiffel Tower line. Bangkok outside the rooftop bars.

The premise is that almost every famous destination is fine if you visit the part of it that is still actually itself. The job of a travel guide is to point at that part.

Travel is mostly about pace

Trips fail or succeed mostly on pacing. Two cities in seven days, walked slowly, are almost always better than five cities in seven days, sprinted through. The traveller who stays a fifth day in Kyoto sees a different Kyoto than the traveller who leaves on day three. The traveller who eats dinner at 9pm in Lisbon sees a different Lisbon than the one who eats at 6pm. The traveller who skips the Versailles day-trip to spend that day walking the same arrondissement in Paris three more times has had a better trip than the traveller who didn’t.

We tend to recommend longer stays, shorter lists, lunches that take an hour, and the mid-morning rather than the dawn. The good travel writing is on the side of slowness.

On overtourism, honestly

The cities being damaged by overtourism are a small percentage of the world’s destinations. The rest aren’t. We try to write more about the rest. When we write about an overtouristed place — we will continue to write about Bali, Paris, Rome, Barcelona — we try to point at the parts that aren’t broken yet, and we try to be honest about the parts that are.

We don’t pretend the problem doesn’t exist. We don’t pretend that any single guide solves it. We just try not to add to it by recommending the same five places in every guide.

On money

Money is the most under-discussed dimension of travel writing. The headline of most travel content is the destination; the buried lead is the cost. We try to invert that. Every Packzup guide has a budget section with absolute numbers. The traveller who reads us shouldn’t be surprised by the bill.

This goes both directions. Bangkok at $35/day is honestly possible. Tokyo at $35/day is honestly not. We say both things plainly.

On photographs

The relationship between travel photography and travel reality has gone permanently strange. The photograph of the rice terrace at dawn is not lying, but it is also not telling the whole truth — the truth is that there are sixty other people standing on the same path with cameras. We try to write about the experience of the place, including the part of the experience that involves the sixty other people. The photograph is a fragment. The trip is the full text.

What we’ll never do

We will not accept press trips that require us to write a positive review. We will not accept paid placements that aren’t visibly disclosed on the page where they appear. We will not run pop-up newsletter forms that block reading. We will not autoplay video. We will not run native advertising that’s designed to look like editorial. We will not write listicles for the algorithm. We will not pretend a city is “up-and-coming” because it’s currently under-covered — sometimes there are real reasons it’s under-covered, and we’ll say those reasons too.

The list of things we won’t do is, in many ways, the brand.

A short list of things we believe

Stay longer. Walk more. Eat where locals eat — meaning, where actual locals are sitting tonight. The shoulder season is almost always the right season. The famous attraction is often, but not always, worth the queue. The second city is often better than the first. The trip is the conversations you have along the way. Pay attention to the breakfast more than the dinner. Carry less. The best evenings are the ones with no plan.

This is the editorial document. The guides are where we try to live up to it.