I spend quite a bit of time reading a variety of articles, blogs and opinions on where to travel, why you should travel there and how to do it right.  Sometimes they are spot on, other times I couldn't disagree more.  I usually end up a little jealous that they were there - wherever it was.  I couldn't possibly recount every word I read but what I am going to attempt here is to pick my top three articles, each week or so, and tell you about them so we can all benefit.  It might be my three favourite places, or it might just be a particularly well written piece.  Alternatively it contains a really interesting story.  In any case, I hope it's entertaining and useful!  

First up is a quick look at Annecy, France - in the words of Brooke Saward:  The cutest town in France.  When someone says that, you should take notice.  It's apparently just a bus ride from Geneva (albeit an hour long one) with trains from Lyon and Paris also available.  Which reminds me, I'm overdue my annual trip to Lyon.  

Next up comes Formentera, Spain as published by Devin Friedman in Travel and Leisure. The opening paragraph:  

One of the best in terms of useful content and enjoyability Twitter Chats we've found to take part in is the #luxtravelchat on Thursdays at 12:30pm EST created by @luxurytravelmom & @mrsoaroundworld. It suits us down to the ground: we love a bit of luxury, we love to hear how others have found luxury on their travels, and the feeling during the chat is that everyone involved wants to spread that love around and make sure others can partake in luxury while travelling.

This latest chat was about Luxury Trends and how they affect how we travel around the world:

This chat started out by asking: 

Millennials like to travel in a tribe, are they the only ones? Who likes to bring the whole gang? 

@DelightThoughts hit it right on the head by starting out the answers with: "I only like to travel in groups IF everyone agrees that people are free to do their own thing."

There was an outpouring of agreement from all sides including ourselves, @concierge_99 and organiser of the chat @mrsoaroundworld, both exclaiming “Amen!” in response! 

@LuxeRecess clarified how group travel should be done: “I love travel in big groups if we rent a house or villa and make meals events. Otherwise, nah.” 

And @Aardvarksafaris took it a step further with: “We have 'clans' of families, & the new trend of bringing your friends and family on honeymoon” which caused quite a stir as many felt honeymooning with friends was too much. However, we pointed out that #friendmoons are actually quite popular these days! (Ahem, we had one! :D)

First question bounced out at us at 9:30am on the dot via @bohemianceblog with: 

“What is it about a country that makes it 'friendly'?”

There were many varied answers from Twitter users all over the globe claiming that what makes a country ‘friendly’ ranges from its people, to their specific behaviour regarding giving directions or even sharing food, all the way to the structure of their public transport systems. 

@PostcardandTag put it eloquently by tweeting: 
“When people make you feel at home in another land. They are nice, helpful, warm, and welcoming.”

@cvoyagerm joined in with a very practical point from their current experience, which in our opinion is an underrated trait in people when you’re hungry and in an unknown land...: 
“They want to share food :) It’s their attitude, I recently moved to NZ and overwhelmed by how much people want to help”

Concierge99’s own @siamac stated quite sensibly: 
“If a country can find the balance between helpful and intrusive, they are on the right track to making friends!”

And to round out the remarks, @african_impact said:
“Helpful public transport! Nothing more terrifying for first-time travelers than feeling intimidated and afraid to ask for help.”

Welcome to the very, very new blog by the team at Concierge99! We've been bringing travel content to you for a while via the Top 5 Guides (so far from London, Granada and Brooklyn), but this is more personal, more direct-from-me-to-you type stuff and we're looking forward to interacting with you, the travel community. We'll start off easy with an introduction of Concierge99; who we are, what we're doing and why you should give a hoot about the information we're throwing out there. 

We're a very small team here - just the two of us so far: Siamac and Julieanne. We both live in Granada, Spain having recently moved from London, UK in 2015 to make a go of this travel malarkey - we love travelling so much, we want to live everywhere the sun shines (cuz we love the sun too).

So where does starting an online concierge business come from? Well, having lived in various places around the world including Brooklyn, Cairo, Cork, Dubai and Lahore, and holidayed in countless others, we found it difficult finding and booking fun and even necessary things to do while away from home. We were trying to do things like rent a boat in Capri or meet a cool local tour guide in Florence, also boring things like book a hair appointment and find a yoga teacher on those longer trips - all of which required a bunch of time searching on the internet and making phone calls when we were supposed to be just enjoying ourselves or working remotely.

So we thought..."we can do something about this!"

What if, in every place we visited, we could live just like we do at home? Access local treats and services by local experts; easy to find and easy to book, no wasting time in research, multiple price comparisons or making phone calls. And so Concierge99 was born. 

We started with what we knew: London, the city full to the brim of exquisite food, drink and things to do out the wazoo. It's all out there, but you can easily go wrong if you don't know where to look. The local experts in our London marketplace (those wonderful, delightful, fantastic people who were our very first experts ever!), already offer an amazing range of mobile services from hair and nails, personal trainers and private chefs to a personal stylist to help you navigate the London high street. They are all top quality, highly reviewed, genuinely cool people and we are so excited to have them on board. 

Now we invite you, our lovely readers, to browse the site, see if there's anything you'd like to do in London with our local experts. We bring you London as a starting point but be assured it will spread to other cities in the near future. 

We'd also love to hear back from you on anything and everything, whether you're a traveller looking for local treats or an expert with services to offer - just pop an email to julieanne@concierge99.com. 

You'll be hearing more from us here on the blog as we share titbits from around the world of travel, roundups of travel blogs, articles and chats, as well as some of our own musings we hope will inspire, entertain and prove interesting for our readers. To get updated when there's new content, pop your email address into the box in the right hand column and we'll be in touch!