Introduction
Both my wife and I traveled a lot growing up, and we’re planning on continuing the tradition as our daughter grows up.
My goal is for us to be financially independent (doesn’t mean that I’ll retire early), so that we can flexibly spend time in different parts of the world at different times of the year.
Through living in and traveling to different cities and countries individually and together, we’ve amassed a wealth of knowledge and data points that we’re always excited to share with people around us.
While we have the best of intentions, I feel that we’ve had to taper our enthusiasm when sharing because our friends and family may get overwhelmed with the large amount of information that we share, are not able to make it to any of our recommendations, or simply lose track of what we shared with them.
As a result, we felt that we weren’t realizing the full potential of the information that we have accumulated over the years.
Perhaps this is a good segue to my lifestyle/travel project. A big passion of mine is organizing information, and that often comes in the form of aggregating and cleaning data, building a database, and creating an operation out of it. My approach to travel this time is no different.
This first blog in the lifestyle page is intended to show you the database that I’m building to aggregate all the information that my wife and I have accumulated over the years and share it open source so that anyone can access and realize the full potential of our travel insights.
I’m not sure how long this process will take but I wish to share some progress and iterate on the process over time.
Our previous process
Google Maps has been the main source that we use to aggregate different places. We use different lists within Saved Places like “Asia”, “North America”, and “Europe” to add hotels, shops, restaurants, and other attractions by region.
With close family members, we’ve shared our list so that they can not only view but also edit places in our lists.
Before the birth of our daughter, we relied heavily on our Monocle magazine subscription as our main source for local attractions that weren’t tourist traps.
The local guidebooks from Monocle that we rent from the local library or purchase from Amazon have also been excellent sources when they are available for the destination that we’re going (e.g., Honolulu).
Supplementally, we’ve also relied on searching on Google Maps, local YouTubers, word-of-mouth, and friends/family.
Next chapter
I’m in the process of exporting all of our Google Maps folders, cleaning it up, adding contextual information on them, and slicing and dicing the data to allow people to sift through them easily.
Previously I had some experience creating databases on Airtable but I’ve decided to build all my workflow on Notion instead because Airtable was giving me a hard time about record limits as a free user.
One source of my inspiration has been this Airtable base built by a VC fund and research firm.
Ideally, I’d be able to just send a link to my Notion page/database that has the hotels, restaurants, attractions that we’ve been to, looked into, or heard of.
For geographies that we think we know well, I want to offer essentially a self-serve tour guide that is continuously updated and provides unique perspectives. Below is a static, snapshot of what I’m working on building.
Appendix/Resources
Exporting Google Saved Places Update | Josh Kasuboski
I selected “Saved” and downloaded my saved lists on Maps in a csv format. I had over 1k places marked in my folder called Asia and noticed that names of the places that I had saved were broken because they were in local languages. When I imported the csv file into Notion though, the local languages pulled up fine.