Working on a standardized travel podcast. Is this a good idea or am I too naive? Any feedback appreciated.

Hello everyone,

I'm new here and just hoping to get a realistic opinion from you experts, as I'm currently preparing a podcast project alongside my main job and am investing quite a lot of time in it. I appreciate any feedback!

A brief description of what I'm planning:
I always describe it as a “Lonely Planet in audio format for city trips”. A 15-20 minute podcast about different cities with the same categories such as geography, history, sightseeing, local food to try, areas to live in or day trips. I defined a total of 10 categories, each lasting between 1 and 2 minutes. There is no promotion of specific services like restaurants or tour operators in any of the categories. In addition, there should be a short voice message for each place from a local who gives another insider tip - ideally in the local dialect. Logically, I would translate this message. It's also important to say that I'm German and initially publish everything in German.

Why do I want to do this or where do I see the use case?
Weekend city trips are common, especially in Europe. Many people don't usually do much research for these trips. My use case would be that people listen to the podcast episode and get a rough, but not too time-consuming, impression of the city. For example, when you're at the airport or when you're already there and think to yourself “I'd like to learn a bit about the city”. I could also imagine that it could be interesting for business trips if you have a bit of free time and want to get to know the most important things. At least in German language, there is no such standardized format. In the best case scenario, it will become routine for people to listen to the podcast before they go somewhere because they know which categories and which format to expect. Of course, there are countless travel podcasts about Naples, Zurich or Paris - but what I have found are either not very informative or very lengthy travelogues of 45 minutes or more.

Where am I right now?
I have created a large spreadsheet with the 10 categories in columns and about 50 rows with cities, which I am working through one after the other. Initially, I'm focusing on Europe. Of course A-cities like Paris, Amsterdam and Madrid - but also the less well-known ones like Lyon, Rotterdam and Seville. Through research with various AI tools and personal interviews, I create scripts for each city and each category. One city takes about 1.5 hours. I have worked through about half of the cities. In the next step, I would make test recordings + have music-accompanied intro & category announcements recorded by a freelancer. I don't want to launch with only 3-4 episodes ready, but cover all major cities across Europe.

What do I have in mind or what is my vision?
Monetization is secondary for now. At some point after launching (I'm talking about 1-2 years) I would of course like to earn a bit of money with it. Sponsorships would naturally be a possibility. I'm still a long way off, but other ideas would be to launch the whole thing in different languages, as the scripts are available per city per category and only need to be translated. Or you could integrate all the episodes into one app and offer it as a paid/ad-free version with offline availability or additional content. And of course video would be a further expansion stage, although I have the feeling that YouTube is already full of such content. And of course add more cities/places of continents outside of Europe.

Whenever I tell somebody about it, people give me really positive feedback. Besides my brother with a background in content creation. He says mainstream categories like travel/food etc. are saturated and inflated with content. But he is rather skeptical about the monetization aspect. I think the biggest challenge will be to create reach. Also, I don't see it as a podcast that people typically subscribe to and wait for new episodes, but rather search for the episode when they are planning/going on a trip.

Now I would just like to hear your thoughts on this:
Does this generally make sense or am I being too naive in my approach?
How would you organize the recording? Record everything myself (a lot of work + complexity with the pronunciation of language-specific elements such as dishes or sights)?
What other suggestions do you have for improvement?

I would extremely appreciate feedback and wish you all the best with your own projects.