About
What a guide is, and how it gets made.
We're a small team — we build these guides and we answer the email. This page is about the product rather than about me, which I realise is the opposite of most About pages. The process is the interesting part, and it's the part you're paying for.
Why these exist
Every way of researching a trip fails in the same direction. Guidebooks are a year behind. Review sites rank by average score, which rewards whatever is most visited rather than whatever is best — so the top of the list is reliably the place with the queue outside and the laminated menu. Ask a chatbot and you get the same ten restaurants everyone else gets, some of which closed years ago, with none of it checked against the week you're actually there.
Meanwhile the person who lives there has a completely different list, and almost none of it is on the first page of anything.
That gap is the whole product. Find the places people who live somewhere keep going back to, work out which of them fit you, check they're open and the rules haven't changed, and put it on a page you can actually use standing on a street corner.
How a guide gets made
You answer the questionnaire
It's short, and it's deliberately not the usual "what's your budget" form. The highest-signal question we ask is about the best meal on your last trip and why. The second is what would make this trip a win for you. Those two do more work than everything else combined, and they're the reason two people asking about the same city get different guides.
We find the places locals go
We look at how people write about a place, not at its star average. Someone who says "my go-to", "we come here every week", or "order the pie first, they sell out by ten" is telling you something a five-star click never will. Someone saying "touristy", "overpriced for what it is", or "there are better options nearby" is telling you the other thing. We keep the first kind and we name the second kind so you can skip it.
We check it before it goes in
Still open. Still serving the thing it's known for. Rules current for your dates — permits, timed entry, shuttles, the Monday closure that would waste half a day. Where something is time-sensitive we print the date we checked it, so you can see how fresh it is instead of taking our word for it.
It's built around your dates and your people
Real season, real base, real party. A trip with a four-year-old is not the same trip, and a guide that ignores that is just a list. Everyone travelling with you gets factored in — that isn't a paid extra.
Then you tell us what we got wrong
One rebuild is free and I'd genuinely rather you used it. When someone asks for more rainy-day options, that doesn't just fix their guide — it tells me the questionnaire never asked about weather. So the question gets added, and nobody hits that gap again. Your feedback is worth more to me than the sale.
What we won't do
- We won't recommend a place we can't confirm is still there. If we can't check it, it doesn't go in — a short guide you can trust beats a long one you can't.
- We won't rank by star average. It's a popularity contest, and popularity is how the tourist trap gets to the top.
- We won't invent reviews. There are no testimonials on this site, because we haven't earned any yet. When real customers write them, they'll go up, with their names on them.
- We won't pad it. Twelve places you'll love beats forty you'll scroll past.
- We won't pretend to be somewhere we're not. If your destination is outside where we work well, you'll get told that instead of sold to.
The email on the last page
Every guide ends with a real address you can write to. It's there partly so you can reach a person if something's wrong at nine at night in a town you don't know — and partly because those messages are the most valuable thing this business collects. A note saying "the place you sent us to had changed hands" is worth more than any amount of research, because it fixes the next guide too.
Write any time: [email protected].
Local Picks Guide · localpicksguide.com. Guides are produced with our own software; the recommendations are ours and we stand behind them. We don't publish reviews we didn't receive, and we don't claim a track record we don't have.