Travel Guides tell all: ‘WE'VE SEEN THE WORLD BUT YOU CAN'T BEAT NZ!'

These Hamilton jet-setters reckon home is where the fun is

- Kelly Bertrand

For a family who have travelled to some of the world’s most lusted-after locations in five-star style, it’s a bit of shock to hear the following sentence uttered with complete sincerity: “Invercargill has some of the best food we’ve ever eaten!”

It’s just one of many local revelations the Dyer family – Abbey, her mum Jaala and stepdad Stephen – have had while filming the first Kiwi season of TVNZ 2 reality show Travel Guides.

And while their usual deluxe dining experiences and lavish lodgings have been replaced by more humble kai and camping in a Kmart tent, the fun-loving Hamiltonians say the best part of the experience was simply spending a bit of time together after Stephen was stranded in Singapore for almost five months as the pandemic raged on in 2020.

“I travel a lot for my job – I’m actually about to go back overseas,” says Stephen, 56, who works for PricewaterhouseCoopers. “So we were planning to do a trip around New Zealand anyway and then the opportunity to be on the show came up.”

“And for some reason,” interrupts history student Abbey, 22, “the producers thought that we were interesting enough to put on TV – and here we are!”

Travel Guides NZ, based on the wildly successful Aussie series, takes five different groups of Kiwis and sends them off on the same local holiday, rating it out of five based on their own individual tastes.