Why I Created a Travel Guide Publishing Platform After 10 Years as a Freelance Travel Writer

How Saltete was born

Last winter, I was paralyzed with indecision.

I started planning a trip to Greece, and during any bit of downtime when I was not working or parenting, I was staring at my laptop in an anxious haze, 87 tabs open on sites like Airbnb, Tripadvisor, Conde Nast Traveler, and blogs. I cross referenced reviews from rental agencies with comments on geotagged Instagram posts. All to find the best (read: most suitable for my family of five) destinations, accommodations, restaurants, and things to do in Greece. 

Right now, even with infinite information available, we still don’t have an easy way to plan travel. 

What we do have: For the affluent traveler, a travel advisor can customize bespoke itineraries. Spend lots of money to spend little time planning. Or, DIY research. Spend little or no money researching and planning the itinerary but a boatload of your time.

Side note: DIY research is such a time consuming process, of course, because of the staggering amount of info out there. And as a person who’s written some of it, I’m keenly aware that it takes time to sift through what’s helpful and what’s garbage. Sometimes pieces are written by experts who live there, and sometimes they’re written by a writer who’s spent just a few nights. Editorial staffs are skeletal, editors are inundated and overworked, and ad-based revenue models, used by the vast majority of publishers right now, corrupt the content by incentivizing the most views as possible instead of the most useful information. 

So, since I fall into the second bucket, i.e., a non-affluent person (and fine, as a travel writer, a person with some control issues,) I spent about 40 hours researching for a Greece trip. 40 hours! That’s an entire work week, 55 episodes of Real Housewives, three flights from EWR to London — and back.

[Cue dramatic music] If only there was a better way.   

I helped build Saltete because I wanted it to exist. As new models like Substack are proving, readers will pay writers and creators directly for content they find valuable. If I could have spent $20 (or $50!) on a niche guide to Greece for families by paying a trustworthy local expert, saving myself many, many hours of research and general anxiety, I gleefully would have. 

A few other things I was looking for in a travel guide: 

I want it to be digital. 

I love print! Long live print! It just makes sense to have an interactive guide with maps when you’re in an unfamiliar place. 

I want to discover things that are near me right now.

During the already-noted many hours I research and plan travel, I used to make color-coded Google maps (nerd alert) so I could alleviate my Travel FOMO. What’s Travel FOMO, you ask? It’s the low-level stress you feel about missing out on something because you didn’t do enough research. You’ve just finished an hours-long tour of the Louvre and you’d love a pain au chocolat, but you’re tired and a little cranky and hit up the first cafe you see. Sad, because Paris’s best cafe was just around the corner. I hate this feeling, and I just want someone I trust (say, a local expert!) to tell me where to go. We built the Near Me feature to do just that. Tap the pin button on the map to see all the places in the guide that are around you at that moment. Et voilà, no FOMO. 

Besides alleviating the FOMO, the Near Me feature also saves hours of planning and research, since you can go with confidence that the local expert who wrote it will flag the very best stuff. 

I want pre-planned (but flexible) itineraries.

Besides creating a color-coded Google map, I also plan travel by plotting out daily Itineraries. Nothing too rigid, just a loose idea of what we’re going to do in a given morning, afternoon, or day. We created a way for guide writers to do this for their readers, with places (cafes, museums, restaurants, and sites) numbered, and a map showing the highlighted path to get to each. 

As it turned out, we had to cancel our trip to Greece. Mere days before we were due to leave from Sicily, where I was on a reporting trip with my family, the wildfires in the region prompted us to evacuate to Rome. The 40 hours were a sunk cost, but my hope is that by the time we try again, a local expert’s guide to Athens and the Greek Isles will spare me from sinking any more time.