— About Localish
We were tired of finding tourist spots disguised as hidden gems.
Every trip started the same way: scrolling TikTok and Instagram for the “hidden gem,” then showing up to find a line of other tourists holding the same screenshot. So we built the thing we actually wanted — a way to ask a real local, directly, what they'd tell a friend.
— What we believe
Four things we won't compromise on.
01
Real people, not algorithms
Every list has a name attached. If you can't message the person who wrote it, it doesn't belong on Localish.
02
Locals set the terms
They write the list, they set the price, they keep most of it. We don't rank pay-to-play.
03
Curiosity over checklists
A good list isn't the ten most photographed spots — it's the place a local actually took their own friend.
04
Trust before scale
We'd rather have 87 great cities than 500 mediocre ones. Every local is vetted by hand.
— The founders
Two people who travel badly, on purpose.
Localish started as a concept from two friends, Lukas and Ario, who constantly tried to find authentic spots whenever they were travelling, or even in Berlin, where they met.
Ario has lived in ten different countries, and for him, to discover a city is simply to walk around and, on purpose, get lost without using Google Maps. Oftentimes, this purposeful wandering led him to hidden spots around town, or he'd encounter people who suggested interesting places to him.
Lukas, on the other hand, spent his childhood in the mountains. He would always choose a hiking trail over a hyped, trendy rooftop bar. He also has a supernatural power to smell out tourist traps from a mile away: the kind of places that try too hard to appeal, with neon lighting, handwritten logo-types, and rows of monstera plants inside.
They both faced this challenge of finding local places wherever they travelled, and dreamed of a platform where they could ask locals for recommendations.