572 city guides, now readable without the app

VoyaBear has been writing city guides for a while. Not the kind assembled from whatever ranks highest, but short lists with a job: what to do on a first day, where to go when the weather turns, what costs nothing, what is worth staying out for.

They lived inside the app, which meant you had to install something before you could read one. That was the wrong way round. A guide is the thing that should convince you the app is worth having, and it was sitting behind it.

So all 572 of them are now pages. Open one, read the whole thing, decide later.

What there is

572 guides across 221 cities, holding 4,772 places between them. Roughly a third are a top ten; the rest answer a more particular question.

• ✦Top things to do — 165 cities, the places most visitors come for, in order
• ✦First day walk — 113 cities, one route that makes sense of somewhere you just landed
• ✦Rainy day — 102 cities, for the afternoon the weather decides against you
• ✦Free things to do — 98 cities, nothing to pay at the door
• ✦After dark — 31 cities, and With kids — 28, for when the usual list is the wrong list

Every place says something

A list of names is not a guide. Each stop carries what the place actually is, its opening hours, its rating, a photograph, and a line about the thing you would otherwise find out too late — the entrance that has no queue, the hour the light is right, the room most people walk past.

They are ordered, and the order means something: the first stop is the one to do first, not the one with the best rating.

Where to find them

On the page for any city we have guides for, under “Guides for …”. They are ordinary web pages — shareable, readable without an account, and findable in a search. Tapping any place in a guide opens that place in full.

Guides are written and checked by us rather than generated per request, which is why a city has a handful rather than one for every question. More cities get them as the catalogue grows.