The Trips That Never Make It Into Brochures: How We Find Places Nobody Talks About

Open any travel brochure and you will find the same twenty places, photographed from the same twenty angles. That isn’t a criticism of the places. Most of them are famous for good reason. But it does mean that a great many travellers spend a great deal of money to stand exactly where everyone else is standing.

We started Sangini Holidays with a different question. Not where does everyone go? but where would we go, if no one had told us anything?

Lists are built from lists

The problem with “top ten” lists is that they feed on themselves. A place gets written about, more people visit, more people write about it, and soon it is on every list. Meanwhile the valley next door, with the same mountains and half the traffic, stays invisible.

So we don’t start from lists. We start from maps, from conversations and from a willingness to take the slower road.

How we actually find them

We ask people who live there. The best tip we ever get rarely comes from a website. It comes from a guesthouse owner, a driver who grew up in the area, or a guide on their day off. Locals know which village still holds its festival for itself, and which beach is empty on a Tuesday.

We follow the edges. When a destination becomes crowded, the interesting places are often one valley, one ferry or one hour further on. We look at what sits just beyond the famous name.

We go and see. Nothing goes on our list because it looked good online. Our founder walks the routes, sleeps in the stays and eats in the kitchens before a single client is sent there. Some places don’t survive that test. The ones that do are the ones you’ll find on our Journeys page.

Quiet doesn’t mean difficult

The word “offbeat” can sound like it means rough roads and cold showers. It doesn’t have to. Many of our favourite places are simply small: a family-run guesthouse with six rooms, a desert camp with three tents, a cabin on a lake with nobody else in sight.

Every place we recommend is checked for safety, comfort and ease. The difference is not in how comfortable you are. It’s in how few other people are there with you.

Why it matters

Travel is one of the few things we do purely for the experience of it. When that experience is shared with a thousand strangers and a queue, something is lost. When it isn’t, a trip has room to become the one you talk about for years.

That is the kind of trip that never makes it into a brochure. It’s also the only kind we want to plan.

If something here sparked an idea, tell us where your curiosity is pointing. We’ll take it from there.