About PlaceCurator

PlaceCurator began with a very personal frustration…

If you’ve made it this far, welcome to PlaceCurator! I’m Phil Brown, a traveler, obsessive trip-researcher, and the founder of this project. For years, planning a trip meant jumping between YouTube videos, Reddit threads, expensive travel books, contradictory blog posts, Tripadvisor debates, and endless “Top Ten” lists that all said the same thing. It felt like trying to assemble a puzzle using pieces from twenty different boxes. And now AI is making that even harder.

I love travelling. I just don’t love the hours of detective work it took to understand a single place. And now, with a large family (three kids, what was I thinking), I have way less time to plan, and there’s way more pressure on delivering a great holiday packed with amazing experiences!

I wanted a way to quickly answer simple questions:

  • What is this place?

  • Why does it matter?

  • Is it worth seeing?

  • What do I need to know before I go?

But I wanted the basics in a clear, consistent way. So I built the tool I always wished existed!

Born From Curiosity (and Too Many Open Tabs)

PlaceCurator is my attempt to bring clarity and simplicity to travel research. It’s the resource I longed for: a calm, reliable, no-nonsense guide to the world’s places. No hype. No fluff. No 3,000-word blog posts when a few clear paragraphs would do.

Just hard facts, helpful context, and practical advice — all in one place.

I’ve always been the kind of traveler who digs a little deeper. I’m the person who pores over maps, who reads the museum plaques, who wants to understand not just what something looks like but why it’s significant. But I also value simplicity. I want the right information, not all the information.

PlaceCurator is built with that balance in mind.

Why PlaceCurator Exists

Travel research shouldn’t feel like a part-time job. With PlaceCurator, every entry is short, structured, and easy to absorb. You’ll find the essential facts, the helpful insights, and the practical tips that make a real difference — from opening times and how long to spend, to what makes a place special in the first place.

Along with a few friends and writers I’ve met during my career in digital marketing, my aim is to create a global library of places worth visiting, organised logically from country to region to city to neighborhood. Each page gives you what you need without making you dig for it. And when you’re ready to book, we connect you to the right external links so you can move forward quickly.

It’s everything you’d learn from days of research, distilled into minutes.

A Friendly Voice You Can Trust

PlaceCurator speaks the way I wish all travel guides spoke: clear, warm, and honest. Not too long. Not too opinionated. Just genuinely helpful.

We don’t exaggerate. We don’t oversell. We don’t try to convince you that every place is “the best thing ever.” Instead, we tell you what something is, what it offers, and what kind of traveler it suits. You get the context, the practicalities, and the little insights that help you feel confident and prepared.

Think of it like getting advice from a well-travelled friend. Someone who knows their stuff, skips the nonsense, and wants to make your trip easier.

Built for People Who Love Travel, Not Traffic

PlaceCurator isn’t a content farm. It’s not driven by clickbait, SEO tricks, or endless ads. It’s built for travelers who care about understanding the world, not just ticking off sights.

Sure, we use AI to help with our research and to give us ideas and inspiration, but everything you’ll read is created by a human, for humans, and fact-checked extensively.

Although we’ve visited plenty of the places we feature, we’re actually more interested in sharing the hard facts and vital information. We trawl through all of the information online to parcel everything up into handy tips and insights, rather than half-baked advice from our personal experiences.

We’re super open, and we welcome a message or chat if we’ve got a detail wrong, or our information isn’t up to date.

If you want to explore a city’s neighbourhoods, understand why a landmark is famous, or simply figure out whether a place is worth your time, we’re here to help. Every page is designed to give you confidence, clarity, and a sense of orientation, wherever you’re going.

Here to Make Travel Feel Lighter

At its heart, PlaceCurator is about making travel research feel human again. It’s about replacing hours of scattered searching with a few minutes of clarity. You can search by city, region, country, or just filter depending on your interests. It’s about helping you understand the world without making you work for it.

Most of all, it’s about giving you the joy of travel without the overwhelm that often comes before it.

This all began because I was tired of trawling through endless opinions and conflicting advice. If you’ve ever felt the same, PlaceCurator is for you.

And we’re just getting started.

Phil Brown, Founder of PlaceCurator