Virtual GDBK

We provide the hot, local source material, you plan your trip.

Our GDBK (that's "guidebook" in futurese) brings you a comprehensive, fresh-today compilation of the good online resources about your destination—blogs, recent travel stories, local listings and more, all personally chosen by our editors for relevance and quality.

If you are anything like us, researching a trip is part of the fun of travel, or at least a necessary obsession. Which hotel? Which restaurants? What do the local bloggers say? Has Design Sponge done a shopping guide? Are there nightlife listings in English? And so on.

Finding those great, non-toursity websites can be a lot of work, however. Virtual GDBK has taken the slog out of it, and lets you create your own, on-the-fly, personal guide to the your destination. It’s not a single authoritative voice, it’s a collection of them, allowing you to choose what’s right for you. When we have our own opinions on a city, we write them up on our blog.  

In the near future, we hope to bring you exciting mobile tools to organize your travel research even more easily. Stay posted!

About me:

I’m Valerie Stivers-Isakova, a travel writer, novelist and international woman of leisure tired of crappy guidebooks, the banality of luxury and the rusty junket-ville of most travel reporting. I want to know what the cool intelligent people with good taste are doing in a given locale, and then go do it too. Don't you?

This project includes only cities that I know well or have friends in. None of the content is paid for. If you have recommendations, loved something, hated it, or would like to be included as a GDBK resource, please e-mail me, at valerie@virtualgdbk.com.

Ok. Go have fun. And bring your own water bottle so you don’t have to drink 15 tiny Evians on the plane.