William Griffith is the founder of Hilton Ahead, a travel consultancy specializing in advising travelers to experience Hilton Head to the fullest. I live on Hilton Head Island full-time, drive past the villas before I recommend them, and keep a working list of which restaurants will hold a seven o’clock table for somebody I vouch for. The point of this practice isn’t to look like a travel agency. It’s to give you the honest local read on a place I actually know and have been a part of since the early ’90s.

I started hiltonahead.com because the information gap on this island is lighthouse-level glaring. Even searching for reliable, local guidance is met with mixed messaging, bloated Google search results with 10K ads, loops reading the same TripAdvisor pages you could read yourself, you name it. There is just no way to know which Sea Pines bike path floods after an August storm or which Skull Creek table catches the last ten minutes of sunset in late July. I plan one trip at a time, by hand, for people who’d rather text a local than book through a 1-800 number found an hour into visiting a third-party site. If that’s you, the form on the contact page comes straight to me.

I work with all kinds of groups — golf outings, wedding planning, long weekends to see the Salty Dog Cafe after exploring Harbour Town, whichever. Let’s go!