Kevin & Melina · Uluru, Australia
About Blueprint Travelers
First-hand travel guides for people who would rather understand a place than just check it off.
Mission
More research than a travel blog. More personality than a guidebook.
Melina and Kevin started Blueprint Travelers because we couldn't find the guide we actually wanted. Not a list of the top ten things to do in a city. Not a spreadsheet of every hotel in a region. Something in between, written by people who had genuinely been there, cared about the food and the culture, and understood that most travelers don't have unlimited time.
Every destination on this site is somewhere Kevin and Melina have personally spent time. We've eaten at those restaurants, hiked those trails, stayed in those places, and spoken to locals to find what doesn't make it into any guide. We cover Japan, Latin America, Oceania and Australia because those are the regions we know best. We don't write about places we haven't been.
We travel comfortably. Not budget backpacking, not ultra-luxury. We spend where it genuinely adds to the experience and save where it doesn't. If a $600 hotel is just a hotel, we'll tell you. If a local market breakfast at $4 is the best meal of your trip, we'll tell you that too.
Some house rules
A few things we hold to, on every guide, without exception.
01
We have been there. And stayed.
Every destination on this site is one we have traveled ourselves. Not researched from a desk, not pulled from other blogs. We went, we stayed long enough to understand the place, and we wrote it down.
02
We speak the languages. We talk to people.
The best of a place rarely shows up in English on the first page of search results. We ask locals, we read the room, and we follow the answer wherever it goes.
03
Depth over breadth.
We would rather know a handful of countries deeply than claim the whole world thinly. When we say we cover a place, we mean we know it.
A few things about our founders, Melina and Kevin
Languages we speak
English, Spanish, French
First country we each visited
Kevin: Spain.
Melina: France.
How we prefer to get around
Trains or buses, whenever possible
Countries Visited (Collectively)
46 and counting. More important to us than the number is making sure we leave each one having actually understood it.
Favorite food experience on the road
Kevin: chasing hot sauce through every market in Latin America.
Melina: finding the best sandwich in an unexpected city.
Pieces of luggage we each travel full-time with
One carry-on and one personal item. Everything else is excess.
Days spent traveling for Blueprint Travelers:
Over
Days
Money
A note on money
Blueprint Travelers is free to read, and we want to keep it that way. Some of the links on our guides are affiliate links, which means if you book a stay or a tour through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Occasionally a hotel, tour operator, or tourism board will host us or comp an experience so we can review it firsthand. When that happens, it never buys a good review, and we will always tell you. Our opinion is the entire value of this site, and it is not for sale.
The simplest way to put it: we only point you toward something if it is something we would recommend to a friend planning the same trip.
Meet the founders
The two of us
Blueprint Travelers was created by the passion of food, culture, curiosity, and travel of two people. We have stood and experienced every destination on this site.
Melina
Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Experience strategist turned travel writer. She writes the guides, from the ground.
Kevin
Co-Founder & Head of Routes and Restaurants
The planner behind the guides, and the reason we always know where to eat.
