It’s hard to find a comprehensive guide to a new city. One that dives beneath the surface and offers comprehensive and accessible information to experience what’s not found in tour books. Attache was founded to fill that gap and give the modern traveler content that would keep up with them.
How does Attaché decide on its destinations? Why was Mexico City chosen as the most recent episode?
Alex Hunter: We want to go anywhere where there’s a story to be discovered and told. We often arrive in a city with an idea of what we want to capture and the narrative we want to build – but almost without exception the city grabs us by the hand and leads us off in a totally different, unexpected, and wonderful new direction. Serendipity is the mother of all tour guides so we spend a lot of time wandering around the city we’re in – we often clock up 40-50km of walking during a shoot – and in doing that the city unfolds before us. The diners, dive bars, and distractions that define a destination are the ones that we’ll never unearth in our pre-trip research, so we let serendipity take us by the hand and lead us on an adventure. And those discoveries, those moments of stumbling across a hidden gem are what we love to capture in our show.
Beyond that, wherever there is great food and people who love to eat, we can find great content and conversation. There’s nothing quite as compelling, at least for us, as sitting down with someone who’s passionate about their city and their city’s food and just talking with them. The stories, the inspiration, the flavours that come out of those moments are what fuel our entire show. Mexico City had all of that in spades and it yielded one of our best episodes in my opinion.
Who is the target audience for your digital content?
AH: Our audience seem to know their way around a departure lounge. Travel, be it for business or pleasure, is something they seem do frequently and they enjoy making the most of it. But really it’s anyone who loves travel, food, and people. I’m always surprised by the amount of people who tell us that they discovered our show while they were researching an upcoming trip but then watched 5 more episodes on designations they never had any intention of travelling to. That’s incredibly satisfying because it means we’re introducing people to new adventures.
What trends do you see in how and where people travel?
AH: I think people are proving to be a lot more adventurous in their destination choices, which is wonderful. We’re eschewing the “safe” choices and casting our nets much wider when we travel and I like to think that Attaché, along with many of the other great YouTube travel shows, is playing a small part in that change.
Does Attaché work with partners? If so, how do you select the partners you work with?
AH: We do work with partners. In fact we wouldn’t exist without them. Our episodes are pretty expensive to make relative to a lot of content on YouTube (we have to GO to these wonderful places we feature, for starters) so working with carefully selected partners allows us to do that. We try to work with partners who our audience might find useful or interesting. Be they a service provider, airline, hotel group, or tourism board. We’ve been lucky enough to work with some fantastic brands including Cathay Pacific, Emirates, Ancestry.com, Squarespace, and the Japan National Tourism Organisation.
How did the Attaché series begin?
AH: Attaché was borne out of necessity. I spend quite a lot of my life in airplanes, boomeranging across continents on frustratingly brief trips to great cities all over the world. But too often I’d arrive knowing very little of my destination on any level: culture, transport, money, food, or etiquette. Grasping for some knowledge, some guidance, I was dismayed to discover that modern travel content hadn’t really caught up with the modern traveler. So much travel content just showers tourists with the brochure- basics of entire countries and regions, while only scratching the surface of the places they cover. I wanted to figure out a way to break through the tourist veneer of a city and discover its spirit through the people that live there, the food and drink, and the way they live, all while showing deference and respect to local customs. Really, I was scratching my own itch. 
