
Hanoi: What a Guide Adds and What the Old Quarter Teaches You
Hanoi's Old Quarter is a working medieval street plan where each street sold one trade, and knowing that changes what you see.

Hanoi's Old Quarter is a working medieval street plan where each street sold one trade, and knowing that changes what you see.

Paris's visitors concentrate into about six arrondissements, which leaves the eastern half of the city almost entirely to Parisians.

Istanbul's layers of Byzantine, Ottoman and modern history are largely invisible without interpretation, which makes it one of the few cities where guiding pays.

Thailand's tourism industry produces convincing versions of authentic experiences, and telling them apart mostly comes down to who is actually there.

Mexico City is enormous and layered, and the tours worth money are the ones that give you context you cannot read off a building.

Free walking tours aren't free and tuk-tuks charge four times the tram fare, so the question is which guided experiences add something you can't get alone.

Fourteen quieter London places, almost all in Zones 1 and 2, sorted by the thing that really stops people getting there: which days they are open.