'The Good Trip' is a Travel Website for People Who Love the Philippines
No doubt about it, the Philippines—with all its 7,641 islands—is a trip. With more and more tourists coming in every year, there’s also grown a wealth of information online and in print on how and where to travel. But a new Philippine travel website is trying to change our minds on what we need to know before we do.
The Good Trip calls itself a “different” kind of travel guide, featuring content that doesn’t just tell you where to go, but what you really need to know about the places you’re going to. “The Good Trip is a primer for exploring the Philippines, focused on the questions that help us travel better,” reads the homepage.
Topics span bigger issues like conservation and culture, asking, “Did you know?”: Did you know that Whang-od is not the last mambabatok in Kalinga? Or that tarsiers in Bohol have been known to hurt themselves when made to interact with tourists? Or that there are ways to contribute information on the coral reefs while we're on vacation?
"I write about traveling the Philippines for magazines, and I saw a disconnect between the kind of stories I wanted to write and just amount of information that people required and lacked—including myself—in order to appreciate the deeper issues," says writer Nina Unlay, who started The Good Trip as a passion project with friends RJ Dancel and Anna Reyes. "For example, it was because of an interview with [Carlito Pizarras], the 'Tarsier Man' of Bohol that I’d learned how sensitive and introverted tarsiers were. I would tell friends about it, randomly, and most of the time they didn’t know. And it struck me how many of those people would be tourists eventually."
The Good Trip is meant to fill in some of the gaps in knowledge when it came to Philippine travel, especially when it comes to the important details that travelers may not find on traditional travel guides. "Basically, The Good Trip is supposed to make it easy to travel well-informed. One less excuse to go to a place and cause harm just because you didn’t know."
