Locals Know it Best, the travel card game that connects travellers with locals

This is Locals Know it Best, a brand new site by me, Kash Bhattacharya. Besides for the last 16 years running a blog about traveling in style on a budget called the BudgetTraveller, I also founded in 2020, a travel card game called Locals Know it Best, where I wanted to challenge tourists to unplug on their vacation, construct an entire trip where they were guided by locals and the help of our cards. The aim was to inspire people to have an old fashioned adventure where they talk to locals, get lost, make some new friends and rediscover the meaning of travel.

One of the glorious things I love about travel are the moments that are never planned, the spontaneous conversations with strangers, people who become friends for that one night in a bar who we may never meet again ( but still follow on Instagram) , the cab driver or barista who share secrets of their city that makes your trip like a fairytale by telling you that one amazing bar or favorite restaurant-sometimes these are the moments , the people you remember when you look back.In a world where travel is becoming a bit too predictable and robotic, where we plan every minute detail of our trip, have started to depend on Ai tools to plan every aspect of our journey, spend too many hours scanning travel websites and social media to get ideas and inspiration for our trip, we seem to have forgetting the people who know the destination better than any Ai tool, guidebook or even travel blog and that’s the locals. While google search is dying , 'human search' is still alive, completely free of algorithms and influence of megalomaniac oligarchs- just need to look around when you arrive at your destination, your hotel or hostel , find a human and ask. You would be surprised how many locals are keen to talk and share their destination. My desire post pandemic was to have travel adventures which did not involve too much planning, looking at my phone and some room for spontaneous connections with locals which is why me and Sabrina came up with the idea of Locals Know it Best, where we challenge ourselves to discover a place without any research or using a smartphone- just locals, a map and our deck of beautifully designed cards.

We’ve had three incredible editions of the game in partnership with Basel Tourismus, Vorarlberg Tourismus and Visit Malta where we met a bunch of incredible locals- no smartphone or guidebook, just our deck of beautiful cards.

We are now looking for more destinations , brands , tourism organisations to partner with for our next version of our digital detox travel card game.Drop us a message if you are curious.

Checkout the Basel Tourismus microsite to get an idea of how it work to partner works. Click here for the story so far and how we got on in Basel and Malta.

We are in the process of speaking to a publisher to launch a general edition of the game so that you can buy and play with it on your next vacation.

If you are interested in working with us to have a Locals Know it Best card edition for your destination, please drop me a line -kash@budgettraveller.org

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