With Meraki Travel Collection

21/08/2026

Applications are now open for The Walking Tour Incubator.

What is the Baguio detail you always point out?

A staircase. A shortcut. A house. A corner. A story about a neighborhood that you think people should know.

The Walking Tour Incubator is a program by Gabe Mercado for ten community storytellers who want to turn one of those details into a walking tour, test it with real people, listen to what comes back and build it again.

You do not need to be a tourist guide. You need something specific about Baguio that you cannot stop noticing and the willingness to work on it.

Three Monday-night online checkpoints begin 21 September, followed by Baguio from 16–18 October.

5 scholarship places for Baguio locals
5 regular places at ₱5,500

A featured event of Design Week Baguio 2026.
Marketing and registration supported by With Meraki Travel Collection.

Applications are open at withmeraki.co.

19/08/2026

During two days of strategic planning with Expertise France in Taal, we invited Rabin Canuzo to spend part of a session telling the group about the place they had come to work in.

He spoke about Taal Lake and the communities around it, and about the work being carried forward through Sagip Taal Lake and Gawa Gawa sa Lawa Creative Community Space. Cleanups. Education. Creative responses to waste. Volunteer work. Years of people noticing what the lake needs and choosing to do something about it.

Rabin is one of many people around Taal doing that work.

For With Meraki Travel Collection, travel is the way we bring people into relationship: travelers and local communities, institutions and businesses, practitioners and experts, and the places and wider living systems they are all part of.

Every place already holds knowledge, livelihoods, histories, concerns and people acting on them. People also arrive with their own purpose, resources and questions. With Meraki Travel Collection works where those worlds meet.

For Expertise France, that meant bringing Rabin and the work around Taal into a strategic planning experience, giving the group another way to understand the place they were spending time in.

A group arrives with its own purpose. A place holds its own priorities. With Meraki Travel Collection designs experiences by holding both at once: listening to what is brought in, and what is already there.

In the end, we left Taal with more to understand, and more to return to.

If your organization is gathering around a purpose, we can shape the people, place and experience around it. Send us an email at [email protected].

19/08/2026

17/08/2026

Baguio is full of things people walk past without knowing there is a story there.

A building you have wondered about for years. A street that means something different once you know who lived there. A neighborhood detail you keep pointing out whenever someone visits.

Sometimes a walking tour begins with something that specific.

The Walking Tour Incubator is for people who want to follow that curiosity further: to research it properly, speak to the people connected to it, work out how the story unfolds on foot, and eventually walk the route with real people.

Led by Gabe Mercado, 10 community storytellers will each develop a Baguio walking tour and test it at least twice, using what happens on the ground to revise the work.

You do not need to be a tourist guide. You need a Baguio story, place or question you care enough about to keep investigating.

THE WALKING TOUR INCUBATOR

10 places
5 scholarships for Baguio locals
5 regular places · ₱5,500 per person

Three Monday-night online checkpoints beginning 21 September
Research + individual fieldwork
Baguio workshop and live testing · 16–18 October

Applications open
21 August · withmeraki.co

A program by Gabe Mercado
Featured at Design Week Baguio 2026
Marketing and registration supported by With Meraki Travel Collection

If a particular corner of Baguio came to mind while reading this, perhaps that is where your walk starts.

12/08/2026