Bart van Poll
Our own Spotted by Locals experience
Since we started Spotted by Locals in 2008, we’ve been visiting “our” 29 cities frequently to meet the local writers (“Spotters”) who share their passion for their city by writing about their favorite local spots in the city they love. Of course, it’s the best part of our job! The last few weeks, we visited […]
8 reasons to start traveling like a local!
We started Spotted by Locals in 2008 because we had experienced traveling like a local would be a more fun and more rewarding way of traveling. Since then, we’ve traveled to 25 cities where we met almost 300 potential locals who love writing about the city they love, for an interview in their favorite spot. […]
Peace and Tourism
Stumbled upon a very interesting article about the increasing role of tourism in achieving peace in the world. I got permission from Dr. Craig Zelizer to publish the first few paragraphs of the article. There are quite a few people who believe that one of the key aspects to promoting increased peace and understanding in […]
Some first figures
Some first figures, exactly 2 weeks after our launch: 32 partners! (check the list in the right side column) 850 unique visitors from 89 (!) countries in the world …Interested visitors , because they checked out about 3 pages per visit, and stayed online for an average of 3 minutes. 24 comments, on 12 postings. […]
Go local on Obscura Day!
Obscura Day takes place on 20 March in about 80 cities around the globe. It’s a “day of expeditions, back room tours and hidden treasures in your own hometown” and is organized by the people behind Atlas Obscura, a collaborative project that tries to catalogue odd and ”strange” projects left out of traditional travel guidebooks and […]
20 partners already!
We soft-launched the Local Travel website five days ago. With hardly any publicity from our side (we’re planning to do that this week), the news of our launch was spread fast, especially on Twitter. We’ve received quite a few e-mails from organizations who are interested in joining our mission. So far, 20 organizations have signed up […]
Local accommodation networks
There has recently been an emergence of online accommodation networks – websites that enable you to bypass hotels and rent a place to sleep from locals, swap your own for it, or just get it for free in return for being a pleasant guest.
Best local travel websites
www.MyFriendshotel.com has written a nice article subtitled “Get down with the locals”, with a list of websites that, as they write, allow you to meet locals without having to go the whole hog and actually stay with “one of them”. I do not agree that all the websites they mention have guaranteed tips by locals, […]
Videos by locals
We’ve been following Tripfilms.com, a travel website with user generated videos of destinations, for a while now. In the last year, the amount of videos on the website has doubled. And I think the quality of the videos added by its members is still very nice! I’ve been in touch with the people who run […]
Couchsurfing thesis
Last year, we met Szilvia Weyer, a former Spotter, in Berlin. She told us then she was working on a thesis about Couchsurfing, and we had an interesting conversation about it Szilvia has been so kind to share an English summary of the thesis with us yesterday. So I hope Spotted by Locals has the […]