When Lucy Honeychurch from E.M Forster's A Room With a View first lands in Florence, she clutches her Baedeker tour guide with a shaking fierceness, indicative of just how travel worked back in 1908: by the book; always by the book. The story progresses to unravel a more liberated Lucy as she abandons her hardback friend, submitting herself to local navigation by more seasoned travellers, cultural escorts even, aware of the lay of the land and eager to offer a more updated counsel. Fast forward to today: the enormity of the world has formed a hunger to conquer each one of its destinations, and we’re laden with untold tips and best kept secrets.

We crowd-source on Facebook – consulting all six degrees of our connections – but what we want is a live version of all the content we access online, much like Lucy, feverish to experience everything. Enter the Cultural Escort: our expert and knowledgable personal guides to the parts of the city only the locals get to see. When we travel, the power of personal recommendations, no matter the medium, is still a central force as shown by the pillars-of-mass sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor and discovery tool Wanderfly. However each one is rife with a sea of anonymous (and thus unreliable) postings. "People are looking to trusted sources to help make sense of the world around them”, explains Jason Clampet, Head of Content at travel startup Skift.com, a daily news resource that aggregates data, trends and insights from the industry's large and small players. “For the last few years they've been charmed by the benefits of user-generated content on sites like Yelp. But user generated pluses are severely limited and the amount of garbage they generate is astounding”.


Travellers are seeking out experiences they can trust to be authentic, and recommendations from those who really know the destination, locals with shared interests, can offer visitors a taste of a city that they can’t get from traditional resources.