“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t where they going.” Paul Theroux’s quote perfectly summed up my romantic notion of travel. My travel dreams, and I bet many of yours, involved stepping off a plane with very little plan. We are the type of travelers that don’t care about top ten lists, we know there is no magic in review sites. We go where the wind takes us. We have faith that we will meet a local whose advice will lead us to the perfect pastry or secret courtyard that the tourists walk by on the way to the next big thing.

Unfortunately, the same way we don’t all wake up looking like Beyonce, travel very rarely works that way. Let me tell you a story, I traveled this way for most of my life. When I was 19, I went to India alone for three months, with no plan and little money.

It was an amazing experience and I grew a lot as a result- but I never actually met that local who helped me experience India as anything more than a tourist. Of course I didn’t recognize this at the time, I didn’t understand that there was a giant tourism infrastructure in place, invisibly guiding me, ensuring that I was in the desert on a runaway camel, when I should have been, let’s be honest, anywhere else.

I continued traveling in this vein for years, whether it was Cambodia or Ecuador. I showed up and figured it out- smugly thinking that people who spent tons of time planning and researching just didn’t get it. Instead, I often ended up relying on the advice of other travelers, or the people who worked in the hotels that I was staying. I rarely got advice from local people who weren’t in some way involved with the tourism industry.

Then I went on a trip with my boyfriend, now husband and co-founder ofLocalMeze. There was no way he was going to float around like me. A data guy at heart, he always made decisions in a measured way. We researched and researched until we could research no more. I knew the trip was going to be a disaster, this wasn’t what authentic travel looked like.

I was wrong, for the first time I actually saw a place like a local. Of course this was before reviews could be bought and blog posts silently sponsored. I was eating phenomenal food, seeing things I had never seen, and finally meeting the local people who I had always been looking for. It was shocking, I had been searching all over the world for this kind of experience.

Unfortunately it didn’t last, the silent killer, the tourism infrastructure, caught on. Those amazing resources we had previously loved became polluted. Our solution, spend even more time researching each trip. Trying to figure out which resources could be trusted became almost a full time job.

This past year, sick of the hours spent on the computer cyberstalking reviewers to see if our tastes aligned, we decided to wing it on our 3 month trip to Europe. All of our stuff was in storage and with no plan for what was next, it just made sense. Plus, we were using Airbnb exclusively so we figured the local experience would be built in. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. We missed an amazing music festival in Spain, a feast day in Italy, we spent two weeks going to the tourist beach before finding the amazing one that we will always call the “goat beach,” we aren’t mean- there were actual goats. We missed these things, and many more, not because we weren’t talking to awesome locals; we just weren’t talking to the locals that made sense for us. After months we realized this, and we started looking for local people who were obsessed with food and drink like we were- the easiest place to find them was the wine shop.

Our trip went almost instantaneously from- this is awesome we are in Europe to, why is no one making a movie about our adventures! We weren’t just getting local advice, we were getting the local advice that was right for us. Think about it this way, if someone is coming to your city, you can give them advice of course, but if that person happens to like similar things to you, you can single handedly ensure that they have a the trip of a lifetime.

All of a sudden it clicked. This is the way that people should plan their travels. It combined my husband’s urge to meticulously research with my urge to wander. The right local person would already know everything about the things you cared most about. They could also ensure that your exploration of a city actually felt effortlessly organic.

We built LocalMeze because we believe that it is only with the advice that is perfect for you, can you ensure that you wander in the right direction.