About Sama Sama

Sama Sama creates honest, everything-in-one-place city guides for travelers who want the truth, not the tourist traps. The name is Indonesian for “you’re welcome” — learnt, with a smile, on Gili Air, and it stuck because it’s what this is: something handed over without a catch.

Why we started

Planning a trip properly means opening fifteen tabs. A blog post from 2019 with prices that are no longer real. A forum thread where three people disagree about which neighbourhood is safe. A “top 10” list that is visibly ranked by who paid. A booking site that shows you the same four hotels in every city. Somewhere in all of that is the answer to a simple question — what will a normal day here actually cost me, and where should I sleep — and nobody just tells you.

So we built the thing we wanted to buy: one guide per city — 37–39 A4 pages, plus a phone edition of the same thing — everything in it, no tabs. Real prices in euros, three budget levels, neighbourhoods with honest “best for” and “skip if” labels, food that locals actually eat, and the boring practical stuff — SIM cards, laundry, airport transfers, tipping — that nobody writes about and everybody needs on day one.

How each guide is actually researched

Every guide is built the same way, in the same order, so that nothing gets skipped because it was boring to check:

• Prices first. We build a day’s spend at three levels — scrimp, comfort and splurge — from real menu prices, real transit fares, real supermarket baskets and real room rates, then convert everything into euros so you can compare Bangkok with Barcelona without doing sums.
• Neighbourhoods second. Where you sleep decides how your trip feels more than almost anything else. Each area gets a plain description, who it suits, who it doesn’t, and what it costs — including the ones we’d tell a friend to avoid.
• Venues third. Restaurants, markets, sights and day trips, each with an address and a live link. Most go straight to a Google Maps pin, so you never type an address into a phone with one bar of signal.
• Then every link gets clicked. Before a guide ships, each link in it is opened. Dead ones are replaced, not deleted, because a missing venue is still a question you’ll have.
• Then it gets dated. Every guide says the year it was researched, on the cover and in the footer of every page. Prices drift — that’s travel — and we would rather you know exactly how old a number is than pretend it’s eternal.

Nobody pays to be in a guide

If a place is in a Sama Sama guide, it is there because it earned the space. Nobody buys their way in, and no venue has ever been given a mention in exchange for a free meal or a free bed. That is the line that matters: the recommendation itself is never for sale.

It also means the reader is the customer, not an advertiser — which is exactly why the guides cost money instead of being given away. €9.95 buys a guide, and that is the business.

What you get, and what you don’t

You get two files for one price: a 37–39-page A4 PDF, designed like a magazine rather than a wall of text, and a phone edition of the very same guide, re-laid out tall and narrow for a screen you hold in one hand — same words, same photographs, same live links. It downloads instantly, it has no DRM, and it is yours — keep it, print it, put it on as many devices as you like.

You don’t get a subscription, an account, an app, a newsletter you have to escape from, or a “premium tier” holding the useful parts hostage. Every city costs the same €9.95. There is no version of a Sama Sama guide with the good bits removed.

Don’t take our word for any of this

Reading about a guide is a poor way to judge one. So our complete Kuala Lumpur guide is free — all 38 pages, the same file paying readers get, nothing removed and nothing watermarked. Take it on a real trip and see whether it holds up.

The database is free too

Alongside the guides we keep an open price database covering 130 destinations in 61 countries — 22,025 tracked facts on transit, stays, groceries and eating out. You don’t have to buy anything to use it. It’s on the destinations page, and it’s the same research the guides are built from.

Where to buy

Buy direct from any city page or from the city guides page — instant download, and the largest share reaches the people doing the research. Our guides are also on Etsy if you’d rather use an account you already have. Our price is €9.95 wherever you buy it, though the new Etsy shop is running a launch sale at the moment.