How I Research a New Destination

(And How to Cut Through the Rubbish)

GENERAL

6/25/20263 min read

When you Google a new destination, the first page is a battleground of "10 Best Things to Do in [City]" articles written by people who may never have been there. You'll get the same five recommendations in every one. You'll see the words "don't miss" more times than you can count.

Here's the process I actually use.

Start with someone who lives there, not someone who visited

The most useful thing you can do before a trip is find at least one person who lives in — or recently lived in — the place you're going. Reddit is still the best tool for this. Sub-reddits for cities and countries tend to have real residents answering questions with specific, current knowledge. Search within the sub-reddit rather than on Google. Posts from two or three years ago are often more useful than recent travel articles. I try to avoid Facebook groups as I got completely overwhelmed with local tour guides in-boxing me when I asked anything about Sri Lanka.

Ask concrete questions: where do locals eat on a Wednesday night, which neighbourhood to stay in if you don't want to be surrounded by tourists, what the trains are actually like. The vaguer the question, the vaguer the answer.

Use travel blogs for context, not lists

Travel blogs are useful for understanding what a place feels like. The best ones give you a sense of rhythm — what a day actually looks like, how long things take, what's worth the effort. They're less useful for "top things to do" lists, which tend to be SEO-optimised and recycled.

When I find a blog post that seems genuinely useful, I check when it was written. Anything over two years old for practical details — prices, opening times, transport — needs cross-checking. Context and atmosphere age better than logistics.

Skip the generic guidebooks where you can

Rough Guides and Lonely Planet are fine for places nobody's covered properly — a chapter trying to summarise an entire country is better than nothing. But for the destinations we've actually been and ground-checked ourselves, I'd use one of our own guides before reaching for a generic publisher.

The difference is what's actually in them. The Marrakech guide and the Sri Lanka guide cover routes we've driven ourselves, and a day by day breakdown of how to spend your time wisely. They're a few pounds each, which is cheaper than the hour you'll lose cross-referencing five different blog posts to piece together the same information.

Maps before you commit to anything

Before I book, I spend time in Google Maps. I'm looking at distances between the places I want to go, what the transport links look like, and whether the itinerary I'm imagining is physically realistic. It's easy to plan a trip that looks fine on paper but involves four hours of driving every day. I will use Rome2rio to give me a run down of the travel links between places.

Satellite view is also useful — good for understanding terrain, how built-up an area is, and whether the "quiet coastal town" you've been imagining is actually a resort development with a car park.

The tools I use

Google Maps — distances, neighbourhoods, and finding places that aren't on any listicle
Rome2rio — quickly checking what transport exists between two places and how long it takes
Reddit — current, unfiltered local knowledge
TripAdvisor — only for recent reviews, sorted by date, on specific places I've already identified. Not for discovery.
The Travel Log Guides — if you're heading somewhere we cover, the destination guides are the most thorough thing I know of

What to skip

Anything that calls itself "everything you need to know" is almost always thin. Instagram is mostly useless for destination research — it shows you what photographs well, not what's worth your time. If you use it look for carousel posts that actually share information with you.

If you're planning a trip somewhere we've covered in depth, take a look at the travel guides. Or sign up for the weekly newsletter below — I share what I'm researching and where I'm going next.