Altroven is curated by Kent McLaughlin. The list of places grows slowly. The standard for adding one is high. The site is not a guidebook and not a database. It is a small magazine with a globe attached.
Each destination here begins as a candidate (a city, a small town, an island, a region) chosen because it has something specific to say that other places do not say in the same way. Prague kept its stones. Kyoto runs on rules you must learn by watching. Detroit is a parable. The editorial criterion is simple. If a draft adds nothing a visitor couldn’t find on the first page of any travel site, the draft is killed.
The drafts themselves are produced by a pipeline of large language models: Anthropic’s Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus, handed the same dimension-based prompt structure and asked to write twelve chapters per place, each anchored in a specific, falsifiable detail. The models generate the raw material. Everything after that is human. We use them because they speed the work up. They do not replace it.
The pipeline is not a content mill. Every draft passes through a quality stage before it is allowed near the cache. Factual claims that cannot be substantiated are flagged and rewritten or dropped, generic prose is sent back, and tiles that fail to say anything that wouldn’t be true of three other cities are killed outright. Photos are sourced from Unsplash and Pexels, attributed in place, and vetted before they ship; misses get pulled or replaced.
What you read on a destination page has been through that pipeline and then through an editor. Sentences get rewritten when the cadence is off. Tiles get pulled when a claim is too clever to verify. Threads get reworked by hand more often than not. The atlas is a graph, not a list, and the edges of that graph are an editorial act.
The site is built with Next.js, hosted on Vercel, cached in Supabase, typeset in Noto Serif and Manrope. The dark palette is on purpose. The slow-drift hero animation is on purpose. The refusal to add an itinerary builder, a hotel booker, or a star-rating system is also on purpose. The things I want from the internet are simple: a quiet room, a long sentence, a place I hadn’t thought of, a thread to pull. Altroven exists because they have become hard to find on the modern travel web.
Creating this site has been its own reward. I hope it gives you something.
If you spot something wrong, something thin, or something that reads like it came out of a machine without anyone in particular standing behind it, write to me at kent@altroven.com. Corrections are credited and welcomed.
Kent McLaughlin · curator