We stayed first, so you can book with your eyes closed

A wide-angle photo, a five-star average, and a cottage that turned out to back onto a car park. Anyone who has booked a holiday online knows the feeling: the gap between the listing and the place.

Chikmagalur is full of extraordinary places to stay: coffee estates that have been in the same family for a century, bungalows wrapped in mist, cottages where the loudest thing is the rain. But they’re hard to find, harder to trust, and usually a phone number passed around by word of mouth.

So we made a rule for ourselves: we only list a stay after we’ve slept in it. We photograph it as it is, price it plainly, and write it up the way we’d describe it to a friend: the good, and the bit about the road. That’s the whole company.