We Built a Travel App. Here’s Why, and What’s In It.
Hidden Gems is now live on Google Play. It’s free, there are no ads, and every place in it is somewhere we’ve actually been.
The list that got out of hand
A few years ago we started keeping a note on a phone. Just a list of places we’d stumbled into by accident and wanted to remember.
A waterfall in Georgia we only found because we took the wrong turning. A bakery in Tbilisi where they still bake bread by pressing the dough onto the wall of a clay oven sunk into the floor. A wadi an hour from Dubai with natural swimming pools that almost nobody visits. A beach in Lofoten that takes forty-five minutes of climbing over a mountain pass to reach, and is worth every step of it.
The list got long. Then it got unwieldy. And every time someone asked us “where should we go in Georgia?” we ended up scrolling back through two years of notes trying to find the name of that one place.
So we built the app we’d been wanting.
What was actually missing
There is no shortage of travel apps. There are apps with every restaurant in a city, apps with every hotel, apps with millions of listings scraped from everywhere.
That was never our problem. Our problem was the opposite — too many options, none of them vetted, and none of them answering the questions we actually had.
When you’re planning a day out with young children, the things you need to know are boring and specific:
- Is there parking, or are we circling for forty minutes?
- Is it free, or is this a 200-dirham afternoon?
- What time should we get there so we’re not sharing it with three tour buses?
- Is the walk manageable, or will someone need carrying the last kilometre?
That information exists in exactly one place: the head of someone who’s been. It’s almost never in the listing.
So that’s what we built the app around.
What’s in it
Seventy hand-picked places, growing every month. Currently spanning the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Georgia, Türkiye, Portugal, Serbia, Tanzania and Zanzibar, Norway, Hungary, the UK and more.
Honest practical detail on every one. Best time to visit, how busy it usually is, whether it costs anything, whether there’s parking, and whether it works with kids.
A quick summary on each gem so you can tell in about five seconds whether a place suits you, rather than reading three paragraphs to find out it’s a two-hour hike.
A map you can search. Look at where you’re going and see what’s nearby.
Filter by country, so you’re not scrolling past Norway when you’re planning a weekend in Ras Al Khaimah.
Save the ones you like, then drag them into a day-by-day itinerary. Share the whole thing with whoever you’re traveling with.
Add your own. If you know somewhere that deserves to be on the list, put it on. Rate places you’ve been. Leave a tip for the next person — where to park, what to bring, what time to arrive. That’s the part we’re most looking forward to.
What it isn’t
It isn’t a booking platform. We don’t sell you the hotel or take a cut of the tour.
It isn’t comprehensive. Seventy places is not every good place in the world — it’s every place we’ve been and thought was worth telling someone about. It’ll grow slowly and honestly rather than by scraping a database.
And it isn’t polished by a team of thirty. It’s one person building it in the evenings, which means there will be rough edges. If you find one, tell us — genuinely, that’s useful.
Who it’s for
If you live in the UAE or the wider Gulf and you’re tired of the same five weekend suggestions, this is aimed squarely at you. Most of what we cover is within driving distance or a short flight.
If you’re traveling further and you’d rather see the thing nobody photographs than queue for the thing everybody does, likewise.
And if you’re traveling with children and you’ve ever arrived somewhere to discover it was completely unsuitable — we’ve done that more times than we’d like to admit, and it’s most of the reason this exists.
Get it
Hidden Gems is free on Google Play. No ads, no subscription, no upsell.
It’s Android only for now. An iOS version depends entirely on whether enough people want one, so if that’s you, let us know.
One Ask
The app is only as good as what’s in it. If you’ve got a place you love that doesn’t turn up on the first page of a search — add it. Leave a tip on somewhere you’ve been. Tell us what’s missing.
We started this because we couldn’t find the information we wanted. The whole point is that it gets better when more people who’ve actually been somewhere put in what they know.
See you out there.
Where to Next?
Some of the places already waiting for you in the app — and the full stories behind them:
Georgia with kids — mountain villages, cable cars and the best-value family trip from Dubai right now
Serbia beyond Belgrade — the quiet corner of the Balkans nobody flies to
Ras Al Khaimah and the UAE’s wild side — wadis, natural pools and mountain roads an hour from the city
Portugal with a family — beyond Lisbon and the Algarve crowds
Zanzibar — safari, Stone Town and what it actually costs
Türkiye off the tourist trail — where to go when you’ve already done Istanbul
Hidden Gems is built by the team behind EscapeXpress. Google Play is a trademark of Google Inc.
