Co-founder & editor-in-chief

Melina Goldman

Experience strategist turned travel writer. Every destination on this site, written from the ground.

How I got here

I grew up in the United States with a French mother, which meant Europe was never abstract. It was summers visiting family, learning to read a place through its food and its language rather than its landmarks. Later I spent a summer living in Honduras and half a year in Italy, and that was the education that stuck: the culture of a place lives in the everyday, not the highlights. The morning coffee ritual. The neighborhood locals actually go to. The restaurant nobody outside the city has heard of. That is what I look for when I travel, and it is what I build into every guide I write.

My background is in experience strategy and interior design, years spent thinking about how people move through spaces and what makes an experience feel considered. That training never switched off. It shapes how I structure an itinerary, which details I notice, and how I think about the difference between a trip that is merely nice and one that stays with you for years.

Blueprint Travelers is the work I left a successful career to build. That was a deliberate choice, made with both eyes open, and it is the most ambitious thing I have done. Every destination on this site is one I have traveled myself, from Patagonia to Japan to the South Pacific. I write most of the guides here, and I hold them to the standard I would want as a reader: specific, honest, and worth your time.

Our Other Founder

Kevin

Co-Founder & Head of Routes and Restaurants

Where I have been

Thirty-four countries... and counting

First-hand is the whole standard. These are the places I have lived in, returned to, or spent real time researching on the ground.

Blueprint Travelers — Traveled Countries Map

How to read it

The countries in green are the ones I write about on Blueprint Travelers. The rest are where I have been. Hover any name to find it on the map. The ones I cover link straight to the guides.

What I write about

I write across five regions, and the through-line is always the same: how a place actually works once you are standing in it. In Latin America, that means Patagonia from both sides of the border, the Atacama desert, Buenos Aires by neighborhood, Machu Picchu, the coffee valley of Colombia, the mystery of Easter Island, and Panama’s lesser visited landscapes. In Japan, it is the slow version: Tokyo by district, the highlights of Kyoto, the best onsen town, and Osaka’s Universal Studios. In New Zealand, the road trips that make the country make sense, from Northland’s twin coasts to the Queenstown-to-Christchurch drive and the best of the South Island’s day hikes. In Australia, Melbourne, Kangaroo Island, and the Top End around Darwin.

What ties it together is a point of view about how to travel. I write for the person who would rather spend a morning wandering the boardwalk at Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro than a week inside a resort they could find anywhere.