An email landed in our inbox from someone named Glen, asking to list us in his Costa Rica business directory. We get pitches like that constantly and almost all of them go straight to the trash. This one we actually read twice.
What caught us wasn't the pitch itself, it was the idea behind it. Most directories that reach out to us are generic tourism platforms covering half of Central America, or pay-to-play apps where anyone with a credit card gets a badge. There aren't many directories built specifically around Costa Rica, run by someone who actually knows the country and checks the businesses on it himself. That's rare enough that it made us want to know more.
Travel with Glen is a directory of Costa Rica businesses with one rule that makes it different from everything else in our inbox: the founder, Glen, personally checks every listing before it goes up. Not a form that auto-approves after payment clears. Not an algorithm scraping Google reviews.
An actual person vetting the place, deciding it's real, and then telling travelers about it. It costs nothing to be listed. There's no ad buy, no "premium placement" upsell. Here's the thing about running a small, vertically integrated chocolate business in Playa Brasilito: we don't have a marketing department competing for ad space against resort chains. We grow our own cacao on two farms in Upala and Llano Azul, roughly 97 hectares and 67,000 trees, then ferment it, roast it in our own factory, and hand-wrap every bar
ourselves. That's the whole point of what we do. But it also means we're never going to outbid a big platform for visibility, and honestly, we don't want to. We'd rather be found by the traveler who actually wants to spend a half-day walking a working cacao farm at the base of Tenorio Volcano, standing on ground that includes a pre-Columbian archaeological site dating back to 300 BC, than show up as a blurry thumbnail between a zipline tour and a souvenir shop.
That's the real argument for a curated, human-reviewed directory over a big listing platform: discoverability and fit aren't the same thing. A generic site optimizes for volume, whoever pays or ranks highest gets seen by everyone, regardless of whether it's actually what they're looking for. A directory where one person has done the legwork optimizes for
match, it connects the traveler who wants something specific to the business that actually delivers it. We'd rather have ten visitors who read about our farm tour and genuinely wanted the Caju site history and the Maleku cacao story, than a thousand who clicked because we outspent a competitor on ads.
What sealed it for us was learning how Glen builds out each listing. Real photos of the actual place, our farm, our factory floor, our team, not stock images of generic cacao pods pulled off a stock site. If you're going to tell someone's story, you should show them what's actually there.
We're a small operation making a real thing, one bean, one bar, one visitor at a time. A directory that checks its work before publishing it, and that exists specifically for Costa Rica instead of treating it as one stop on a regional map, fits how we already do business. If you're planning a trip here and want to find places that were actually vetted instead of just paid for, that's where we'd start looking.