How Places You Will Love finds the places that find us first.
People ask us this question more than almost any other.
How do you decide where to look? How do you choose which destinations make it into the collection? Do you have a map on a wall somewhere, pins in the cities you want to cover, a strategy for geographic expansion?
The honest answer is no.
We have never started with a destination. We have never sat in a room and decided that this year we would focus on Portugal, or that the collection needed more properties in Southeast Asia, or that it was time to add something in the Azores.
We do not choose the destinations.
The destinations choose us.
It Always Begins With a Property
Every place in our collection arrived the same way.
Not through a press release. Not through a hotel owner reaching out. Not through an industry contact recommending a property they thought we should consider. Not through a travel fair, a trade publication, or a destination marketing campaign.
It arrived through a review.
Somewhere in the vast, continuous, multilingual conversation that millions of travellers are having every day across every platform — a conversation about where they stayed, how it made them feel, what they will never forget — a pattern emerged around a specific property. Guests described it differently from the way guests describe most hotels. With more emotion. More detail. More of that particular urgency that comes when someone has experienced something genuinely rare and needs the world to know.
That pattern is what we follow. And the property it leads us to is always the beginning, never the destination.
The destination comes second. Always.
What Happens When We Find a Property That Deserves Its Place
When guest love leads us to a property that passes our further layer of scrutiny — when the location is irreplaceable, the character entirely its own, the hospitality unmistakably human, the purpose clear — something shifts in how we work.
The property is no longer the object of our attention.
It becomes the lens through which we begin to understand somewhere.
We do not add a hotel to a destination we already know. We research a destination we have just been introduced to — through the hotel, through the guests who loved it, through the particular quality of experience it represents.
This is a fundamentally different way of building a travel collection. And it produces fundamentally different results.
The Research That Follows
When a property earns its place in our collection, the destination research begins immediately. And it is thorough in ways that a conventional travel guide rarely is — because it is always anchored to a specific experience rather than a general overview.
We are not asking: what is there to do in this city? We are asking: what is there to experience in this city for a guest who is already staying somewhere exceptional, who has already been calibrated by that property's particular quality of hospitality, who arrives with a certain openness and a certain standard?
These are different questions. They produce different answers.
We research the immediate landscape. What surrounds this property? What can a guest see from the terrace, reach on foot, discover within an hour? What does the land look like at different times of year, different times of day? What is the quality of light in the morning? What happens to the valley in autumn?
We research the local culture with genuine curiosity. Not the highlights listed in every guidebook, but the living culture — the markets that locals actually use, the restaurants that have been there for three generations, the festivals that the tourism board hasn't discovered yet, the artisans whose workshops are down unmarked streets. The things that make a place itself rather than a version of itself produced for visitors.
We research the guest experience in the wider destination. What do the guests who loved this property also say about the surrounding area? Where did they go? What did they find? What did they wish they had known before they arrived? The collective knowledge of travellers who have already been is often the most accurate guide to what a destination actually offers versus what it claims to offer.
We research the context — historical, ecological, social. Why does this place exist where it does? What shaped it? What is the relationship between this landscape and the people who have lived in it? Understanding a destination at this level is what allows us to write about it with the depth and honesty that our guests deserve — and what allows us to connect them with experiences that feel genuinely meaningful rather than merely convenient.
We research the seasons. A destination is not a single thing. A Slovenian lake in July and a Slovenian lake in November are almost two different places. A Sicilian hilltown in September, after the harvest, has an atmosphere entirely unlike the same hilltown in August when it is full of visitors. We want to understand every version of a destination — its moods, its rhythms, its best and most honest self at different points in the year — so that we can guide our guests to arrive at the right moment for the right experience.
We research what is nearby. A property in Tuscany opens the entire region. A hotel in the Alentejo is a gateway to a corner of Portugal that most travellers drive through without stopping. A boutique palazzo in a secondary Sicilian city is the beginning of an understanding of Sicily that most visitors never achieve. The destination research we conduct always extends beyond the immediate surroundings — because the most extraordinary travel experiences are rarely contained within a single location.
Why This Approach Produces a Different Kind of Collection
Most travel collections are built destination-first.
Someone decides the collection needs coverage in the South of France. They research the best hotels in the South of France. They visit, evaluate, select. The destination leads to the property.
This produces comprehensive coverage. It does not produce the kind of collection where every property feels like it was discovered rather than chosen.
When the property leads to the destination, something different happens.
The destination arrives in our collection as a specific, textured, emotionally anchored experience rather than a category to be filled. We know it through the lens of a place that guests loved — which means we know it in the way that matters most to the travellers we are trying to serve.
We know which month the light is extraordinary. We know which restaurant the hotel staff recommend to guests they want to impress. We know what the surrounding landscape looks like after rain. We know which nearby village is worth an afternoon and which is worth a full day. We know what kind of traveller this destination will suit and what kind will find it frustrating.
We know all of this because we learned it by following the guest signal — and then following it further, deeper, more carefully than the destination itself might have thought to tell us.
The Destinations We Never Expected to Love
This approach has taken us to places we would never have looked for on a map.
To a stretch of Slovenian countryside that most Western European travellers could not place on a map — and that guests of a particular small hotel there consistently describe as one of the most beautiful places they have ever been. To a secondary city in southern Italy that appears in no major travel publication's list of must-visit destinations — and that, through the lens of a single extraordinary property, reveals a depth of history, food culture, and human warmth that makes the more famous Italian cities feel almost overexposed by comparison. To a coastal village in a country whose tourism industry has barely begun — and that, precisely because of that, offers a quality of authentic experience that more established destinations can no longer provide.
None of these destinations were on a strategy document. None of them were identified through market research or competitive analysis or trend reports about emerging travel destinations.
They were identified because a hotel somewhere within them made guests feel something they couldn't stop writing about.
And that, in every case, turned out to be reason enough.
What This Means for the Travellers Who Come to Us
When you discover a destination through Places You Will Love, you are not discovering it through the lens of a marketing campaign or a tourism board's best self-presentation.
You are discovering it the way the most honest travel writing has always worked — through a specific, human, emotionally grounded experience that happened to someone who was there before you.
The property came first. The research followed. The destination arrived in our collection not as a pin on a map but as a living, particular, deeply understood place — seen through the eyes of the guests who loved it and the selectors who followed that love wherever it led.
This is why our collection will never be comprehensive. It will never cover every destination, every region, every corner of the map that a traveller might want to visit.
It will only ever cover the places that found us first.
And those, in our experience, are always the places most worth finding.
Explore the collection of places that found us → View the Collection
Let us find the right one for you → Take the Quiz