When her friends want to know where to go in London or Milan, they go 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. “In the same way that people are addicted to Zillow, I spend my free time on AirBnb,” she says. “I read every review. I cross reference with multiple sites. I go insane.” The result is an exclusive Google Doc of vetted, personal recommendations, from restaurants to shops to hotels, that, in a TikTok-ified world of SEO-motivated, AI-generated travel guides, has become a valuable resource—if you know where to look.
Petrarca is just one of many people who either make travel docs, or swear by them. “This is my Roman Empire,” Emma Bates, a 31-year-old from New York, says of her New York City doc that she’s been updating and perfecting over the past eight years. At any given time, docs like Petrarca’s and Bates’ are being sourced, edited, and passed among friends of friends looking to get something more authentic out of their vacations than the traditional tourist hit lists. The types vary, from Google Maps lists that give a visual perspective into where to find the best spots to a mysterious Microsoft Word Document of Paris recs that’s been passed through so many people, no one knows who first made it.
By and large, both doc-makers and doc-users came to docs for the same reason. “I got so sick of people going to London and complaining about not having a good time and telling me where they went, and it was some stiff place that got a high rating from a boomer on Time Out or a bro on The Infatuation,” Mia de Graaf, a 33-year-old from Brooklyn who grew up in the UK, says. Since 2016, she’s put together docs for NYC, London, Mexico City, Paris, and Rotterdam in hopes of steering her friends off the beaten path.
The old ways of finding travel recommendations, even those from just a few years ago, are now approached with a heavy dose of skepticism. “Nothing is more embarrassing than waiting for a viral pastry because some influencer said it was yummy after not paying a dime,” Kristen Talman, who lives in DC and travels using docs from friends, says. While a restaurant may get a viral rave or make the top of a website’s must-see list, it’s highly unlikely the curator had a specific reader in mind. Instead, they’re often fighting for maximum clicks or virality, and don’t account for personal taste.
“I want recs from someone who travels in a similar way that I do and wants to spend their time in a similar way that I do,” Petrarca says. “It’s almost like matchmaking.” Natalie Held, 24, similarly likens the docs to dating, and how “it’s usually better to go on a date with a friend of a friend than a guy from Hinge.”
“Nothing is more embarrassing than waiting for a viral pastry because some influencer said it was yummy after not paying a dime.”
While Google Docs and Maps are easily shareable, some creators keep them close to their chests. “The docs I make are usually a curation of my friends’, lovers’, and personal recommendations of the cities I’ve been to,” Held says. “For this reason, they’re kinda sacred to me.” She appreciates the time, effort, and gesture of a good city doc, and tries to repay the favor: If anyone shares a doc with her, she’ll offer one of hers in return.
Bates has similarly been sent a doc under explicit instructions not to share it, and de Graaf will withhold docs based on the conditions of the cities. For instance, Mexico City “is getting overrun with Americans and Europeans and doesn’t need anymore of that.” And the recs she well and truly loves, the spots she doesn’t want to risk becoming the next trendy hangout that’s impossible to get into, she’ll leave off her lists entirely. “I’ll tell people those ones if they’re really close,” she says.
This isn’t to say the docs are air-tight. “By the time [a doc] is sent to me, I don’t even recognize the name on the account who owns it,” Talman says. Nor are they in short supply. As demand for docs has grown, so, too, has the number of doc makers, to the point that they risk replicating the oversaturation found in other online travel spaces. When Petrarca posted about being in Marseille, for instance, she was inundated with docs from people in her DMs, without ever having asked for one. “I was kind of like, I don’t want all these recommendations,” she says. “There are certain people’s Google Docs that I would want more than others.”
It’s about getting the right recommendations, and not just from people who share your taste, but who have been to the city enough to have reliable intel. Kennedy Monique, a 28-year-old from Los Angeles, goes to France every two to three months, so her Paris doc is made up almost exclusively of places that she happened to come across, like her favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant she once stumbled into while in the neighborhood.
Petrarca’s own recommendations come from her Fashion Week days, when repeated trips to London and Milan gave her plenty of exposure to the cities’ ins and outs. “What I’m looking for in recommendations is like, ‘Stay in room number eight because room number six is really loud,’” Petrarca says. “‘Make a reservation at this place,’ or, ‘This is the place that everyone’s talking about and it’s not that great.’” In other words, details that are too specific or honest to appear on more general-interest lists.
Like Petrarca, these curators spend significant time and work on their recommendations, and see sharing them not as a job, but a gift. “I feel like a good rec—something that is genuinely special and saves you from a tourist trap—is so clutch, so valuable, and it’s been such a game changer,” de Graaf says. “So if you get my doc, that’s a gesture of love.”
In many ways, that’s the real benefit of these docs: the humanity they bring to an industry that feels like it’s become rote and performative. “And then also when you come back, you have something to talk about with that person,” Brendan Klinkenburg, a 33-year-old from New York with a Japan doc, says. “It makes you feel like you’ve shared something in common.”