Who Are We?

Guide Books (www.free-city-guides.com)

Hi! Welcome to Free-City-Guides.com. I’m Kelly and my other half (and official photographer) is Andy. We are a couple, both professional journalists, who love to travel. Over the last 15 years we’ve scoured the globe and our particular interest is cities. It became clear quite quickly that although the guide books we’d bought to take with us were useful, they seemed like they were written for art professors, rather than ordinary tourists. The best tips on things to do in the places we visited actually came from people we know who’d been there before. That’s what made us realise that there was a need for simple ‘down-to-earth’ city guides and we had the knowledge to write them!

Arc de Triomphe Night
Andy’s photo of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris

That was it. We set about making it happen. Andy has a passion for photography and we had great photos of everywhere we’d been. All we did was write down, in order, a list of the places you should see in each city we’d visited. Then we expanded the information on each attraction, eventually writing a dedicated page all about it. So now, on the site there are full city guides to take with you on your phone or tablet along with many sub-pages for when you visit an attraction we’ve written about.

Cape Town Waterfront Marina
The Marina at the V & A Waterfront, Cape Town

But hang on, so many travel sites on the web cover this kind of information – what makes us different? After a bit of research, we discovered that many of the websites offering information on cities seem to be written from generic information. The lack of personal experience in these articles made us realise that the person who wrote them had never actually been to the place they were writing about! Of course, the big names in travel don’t do this, it’s only smaller sites, so we needed something else to make us different too.

Dubai Aquarium Tunnel
The underwater tunnel at Dubai Aquarium

What we hit upon was that the big names in travel are all in this to make a profit – they are businesses after all. That means there will be reasons why certain hotels are recommended or certain tours. We decided to run our site on a not-for-profit basis, so we can be totally independent. Our recommendations are all made from personal experience.

Bath Francis Hotel
We recommended the Francis Hotel in Bath because we actually stayed there and liked it! This was our room.

So that’s it. Free-City-Guides.com is a new kind of travel site to help you get the best from your city break. We hope you enjoy visiting the places we write about as much as we enjoyed seeing them…and writing about them. Have fun!

Kelly & Andy x