City Guides
A travel guide you write yourself.
Most travel guides hand you a list. Someone else’s favourites, an algorithm’s idea of a good evening, the same nine restaurants everybody is sent to. A City Guide starts empty, on purpose. It fills up with the things you come across.
It starts with a thought you have all the time
“I want to try that someday, when I’m in Paris.”
A friend mentions a bakery. A film is set somewhere you have never been. Someone at work spends twenty minutes on a bar in Lisbon. It happens constantly, and almost none of it survives — it goes into a note you never find again, a screenshot buried in four thousand others, or nowhere at all.
Then a year later you book the flight, and start researching the city from scratch, as though none of those conversations happened.
A City Guide is where that goes instead. Ten seconds when you hear it, filed under the city, waiting for a trip you have not booked yet.
What it deliberately is not
Not pre-populated. It has nothing in it until you put something in it. That is the point — everything in your guide is there because you chose it.
No suggestions. Jollyboat will not recommend a restaurant. It has no opinion about where you should eat, and no arrangement with anyone who does.
No ratings, no rankings. You saved it because someone you trust mentioned it. That is a better signal than four and a half stars from strangers.
Not organised by trip. Places outlive trips. You save a bar in Lisbon while planning Copenhagen, and it waits under Lisbon until you need it.
Filed by city, sorted by what it is
Every place goes under a city and one of five headings. That is the whole structure. It is enough to find something two years later without being so much that saving one feels like paperwork.
Eat & Drink
the pasta place a colleague swore by
See & Do
a gallery from a Sunday paper, the swimming spot outside town
Getting Around
which airport bus is the quick one
Sleep & Stay
the hotel a friend keeps going back to
Practical
the pharmacy open late near the station
And then you book the trip
When you start planning a trip to a city you have been quietly collecting, Jollyboat offers you what you already saved. A year’s worth of overheard recommendations, surfacing at the one moment they are useful.
Pull the ones you want into that trip’s Trip Guide, where everyone travelling can see them and add their own. The rest stay in your City Guide for next time.
It compounds. The tenth year of a City Guide is worth a great deal more than the first.