When her friends want to know where to go in London or Milan, they turn to Emilia Petrarca. The 32-year-old is a writer by day but an avid curator by night—not of things, but of places in the cities she’s visited abroad. “The way people are addicted to Zillow, I spend my free time on AirBnb,” she says. “I read every review. I compare with multiple sites. I go crazy.” The result is an exclusive Google Doc of vetted, personal recommendations from restaurants to shops to hotels that has become a valuable resource in a TikTok-powered world of SEO-motivated, AI-generated travel guides—if you know where to look.
Petrarch is just one of many people who create or swear by travel documentaries. “This is my Roman Empire,” says Emma Bates, a 31-year-old New Yorker, of her New York City documentary, which she has spent the past eight years updating and perfecting. Documentaries like Petrarch’s and Bates’ are constantly being researched, edited and passed around among friends of friends who want to get something more authentic out of their vacation than the traditional tourist hit lists. The types vary, from Google Maps lists that offer a visual perspective on the best places to visit to a mysterious Microsoft Word document of Paris recommendations that has passed through so many people that no one knows who created it first.
By and large, both documentary filmmakers and documentary consumers came to documentaries for the same reason. “I was so sick of people going to London and complaining that they didn’t have a good time and telling me where they went and it was some stuffy place that had gotten a high rating from a boomer at Time Out or a bro at The Infatuation,” says Mia de Graaf, a 33-year-old from Brooklyn who grew up in the UK. Since 2016, she’s been putting together documentaries for NYC, London, Mexico City, Paris and Rotterdam in the hope of getting her friends off the beaten track.
The old methods of finding travel recommendations, even those from just a few years ago, are now viewed with a fair amount of skepticism. “There’s nothing more embarrassing than waiting for a viral pastry because an influencer said it was delicious without paying a dime,” says Kristen Talman, who lives in Washington and travels with friends’ travel documents. Even if a restaurant goes viral or makes it to the top of a website’s must-see list, it’s highly unlikely that the curator had a specific audience in mind. Instead, they often fight for maximum clicks or virality and don’t take personal taste into account.
“I want recommendations from someone who travels in a similar way to me and wants to spend their time in a similar way to me,” Petrarca says. “It’s almost like a matchmaker.” Natalie Held, 24, compares the docuseries to dating, saying that “it’s usually better to go out with a friend of a friend than with a guy from Hinge.”
“Nothing is more embarrassing than waiting for a pastry to go viral because some influencer said it was delicious without paying a cent for it.”
Although Google Docs and Maps are easy to share, some developers keep them to themselves. “The documents I create are usually a collection of recommendations from my friends, lovers and personal recommendations about the cities I’ve been to,” Held says. “For that reason, they’re kind of sacred to me.” She appreciates the time, effort and gesture of a good city document and tries to return the favor: When someone shares a document with her, she offers one of her own in return.
Bates was also sent a document with explicit instructions not to share it, and de Graaf will hold back documents depending on the conditions of each city. Mexico City, for example, “is being overrun by Americans and Europeans and can’t use that anymore.” And the recommendations she really likes, the places she doesn’t want to risk becoming the next hip hangout that’s impossible to get into, she’ll cross off her lists entirely. “I’ll tell people about those if they’re really close,” she says.
But that doesn’t mean the documents are completely safe. “When I get a document sent to me, I don’t even know the name of the account holder,” Talman says. And there’s no shortage of documents. As demand for documents has grown, the number of document creators has grown, to the point where they risk replicating the oversaturation seen in other online travel sites. When Petrarca posted about her stay in Marseille, for example, she was inundated with documents in her direct messages from people who hadn’t even asked for them. “I thought, I don’t want all these recommendations,” she says. “There are Google Docs from certain people that I’d rather have than others.”
It’s about getting the right recommendations, not only from people who share your tastes, but who have also been to the city enough times to have reliable information. Kennedy Monique, a 28-year-old from Los Angeles, is in France every two to three months, so her Paris documentary consists almost entirely of places she discovered by chance, such as her favorite restaurant, which she discovered by chance once when she was in the area.
Petrarca’s own recommendations come from her time working at Fashion Week, when she traveled to London and Milan repeatedly and had plenty of insider knowledge of the cities. “When it comes to recommendations, I look for statements like ‘Stay in room number eight because room number six is very loud,'” says Petrarca. “‘Make a reservation here,’ or ‘This is the place everyone is talking about and it’s not that great.'” In other words, details that are too specific or honest to appear on lists for more general interests.
Like Petrarch, these curators spend a lot of time and effort on their recommendations and see sharing those recommendations not as a job but as a gift. “I think a good recommendation – something that is really special and saves you from a tourist trap – is so important, so valuable and a game changer,” says de Graaf. “So if you get my document, it’s a gesture of love.”
In many ways, that’s the real benefit of these documentaries: the humanity they bring to an industry that has seemingly become routine and performance. “And then when you come back, you have something to talk about with that person,” says Brendan Klinkenburg, a 33-year-old from New York who is making a documentary about Japan. “You feel like you have something in common.”
