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A New Way to Meet Smart Locals When You Travel
Say it's your first day in a big foreign city and you wish you had a local buddy to give you the lay of the land. There's now an option beyond your hotel concierge, a tour guide, or the taxi driver who picks you up at the airport.
By Wendy Perrin
Say it's your first day in a big foreign city and you wish you had a local buddy to give you the lay of the land. There's now an option beyond your hotel concierge, a tour guide, or the taxi driver who picks you up at the airport. Today you can get your destination intel via a "Welcome To" chat with a local insider such as a college professor, art curator, or food critic. Context Travel, which operates scholar-led cultural walking tours in 24 cities around the world, now offers to send its "docents" to your hotel or rental apartment, with maps and other resources in hand, for a one-hour sit-down chat followed by an hour-long neighborhood walk-around. The docent will answer any and all questions you might have about the city and how best to navigate it (including such basics as how to use the public transit system or where's the nearest ATM), leaving you with the know-how and tools to go explore on your own.
Context Travel began offering such Welcome To chats last year as a result of traveler demand, and now the company offers them in 12 cities: London, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, Barcelona, Berlin, Istanbul, Beijing, Tokyo, even Washington, D.C. This spring it plans to launch them in all 24 of the cities it operates in. People started requesting Welcome To chats, says Context's London manager, Petulia Melideo, partly because so many travelers are now renting apartments—through sites like Airbnb—and thus don't have a concierge to ask questions of, and partly because so many people staying in hotels don't trust the concierge's recommendations; they assume the concierge's advice is biased because of the commissions he takes from restaurants and shops.
"Our docents are scholars and experts who live in the city and know it intimately," says Melideo. "They spend their time deeply engaged in the city and are trained to share this with visitors. It's like having a friend on the ground. People are thrilled at the idea of spending a couple of hours with an intelligent, like-minded person who lives in the city they are visiting. Think about it, while traveling, how often do you get to talk to a local who is not a waiter or a concierge? What are the chances of you meeting a college professor or an architect and striking up a conversation with them during a trip? We give you that opportunity."
Welcome To chats are totally customizable, adds Melideo. "We encourage clients to tell us in advance what they would like to get out of the two hours, and it's split between sit-down time and walk-around time." With prices for the two-hour chat/walk in the $300 to $350 range, it's not cheap, but given how popular Context Travel is with Condé Nast Traveler readers, it's something to think about as you plan your spring travels.
Topicswendy-perrintrip-planning/travel-tipstrip-planning
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