Our 2019 highlights & plans for 2020

2019 – the 11th year of Spotted by Locals  – was a good one for our community! Some of the highlights of this year:

We launched 8 new city guides

We launched guides for more cities than in any year since 2013. We are super happy with our new Spotters from Bern, Cairo, Beirut, The Hague, Malmö, Rijeka, Chisinau and Minsk!

Continuing our mission to combat overtourism, this year we only launched guides to cities that can actually use more tourism. We are very happy about the positive feedback we received about this move and we will keep this up in 2020 for sure!

We traveled to 17 cities – mostly by train

Sanne on the train

Founders Sanne & Bart traveled to meet Spotters in 17 cities: Beirut, Belgrade, Bern, Budapest, Bratislava, Cairo, Chisinau, Hamburg, Ljubjana, Malmö, Munich, Rijeka, The Hague, Vienna, Vilnius, Warsaw and Zagreb.

The majority of the cities we traveled to, we traveled by train thanks for a big part to our partnership with Interrail.

More and more Spotters meetings

Every year our community of locals grows and becomes more active. There’s little we love more than getting sent pictures of Spotters meeting each other all around the world!

Copenhagen Spotter Cindy & Berlin Spotter Robin organized a weekend for Spotters in Berlin in the first weekend of July and it was a huge success with Spotters from 17 cities attending.

Speaking and publicity

Bart speaking in Rijeka

We had some great PR this year:

• We were invited to speak about Spotted by Locals and city branding in Rijeka.
• Swedish dailies Skånska Dagblade & Aftonbladet interviewed us about our new Malmö guide
• Croatian daily Novi List  interviewed us about our launch in Rijeka
• We started writing a column in the Eurail magazine and a monthly article on the Eurail blog.
• Greek daily Kathimerini continued its weekly “Spotted by Locals” article in cooperation with us
• Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant wrote about us in an article about overtourism
• We wrote opinion columns about overtourism on the Eye for Travel blog and in Swedish daily Sydsvenskan
• MSN chose us as one of the 10 best travel apps for “exploring the world”

Plans for 2020

There is a lot we would like to do in 2020. A few of the plans:

• Keep expanding to cities that could use more tourism rather than less. We’re currently working on 2 cities that start with a T.
• Organize our bi-yearly meeting for all Spotters
• Further improve our apps
• Launch our totally renewed “My spots” system – a new content management system for our Spotters

And we’re already working on some other exciting projects for 2020 that we can’t share yet… We hope we can soon :)