What are the best travel blogs?

Are you ready to set out on an adventure? Whether you’re looking to hit a city with hot nightlife with your friends, relax at a beach with your partner or take a trip that will appeal to your whole family, you’re going to need to do some research.

What are travel blogs?

Travelers have been using the internet to plan their vacations since the internet first gained mass popularity in the 1990s. Of course, we love how easy the internet makes comparing hotel rooms, finding flights, and renting cars once we decide on a locale. But how do you narrow down the best place to travel? Most of us can’t afford to spend the money and take time off work required to make a great vacation multiple times a year, so we want to be sure we’re finding the perfect place with the accommodations, cuisine, and activities that appeal to us. Here’s where the internet quickly came up with a solution: the travel blog. Where newspaper articles and magazine features often paint a delightful picture of a highlighted town and the various events and local fare you’ll find there, the medium doesn’t allow for the same volume of information that we, as internet users, often expect.

On the other hand, anyone could create their travel blog, so the amount of content available is endless. Do you want to go to France but don’t want to wear down the same touristy path to the Eiffel Tower with countless other Americans? Maybe your partner is really into hiking and camping, but you’re nervous about a backpacking trip. Or perhaps you’re a parent to young kids, and you want to make sure you’re headed to a destination where you won’t have to lug your strollers and car seats all over a city that’s less than child-friendly. Whatever your circumstances, you’ll find a blog for that!

A travel blog is simply an online journal (many of which can be maintained for free depending on the online platform) where people with wanderlust record their journeys alongside photos of their adventures. One of the best things about travel blogs is that, more often than not, they’re kept by everyday people who love to experience the world. They may not be professional writers or photographers, and they’re probably not being paid to write about all the places they highlight in their blog (but sometimes they are, and in those cases, they will always include a disclaimer).

You can also find travel blogs by people of all backgrounds, ages, and different budgets. If you’re someone who likes to splurge on a lavish vacation with all the amenities, you can find travel bloggers who review luxurious hotels and highlight Airbnbs where you can live like royalty for the duration of your stay. Michelin rated restaurants and private tours of castles, helicopter rides, and exclusive events- if you can dream it, you can find a blogger who’s been there and blog about that. Alternatively, many travel bloggers spend a lot of time on the road, so they’re not spending big money on every trip. If you like to get away and satisfy your travel bug once every few weekends, countless travel bloggers detail the thrifty ways they manage to travel abroad without spending a fortune. You’ll find recommendations on where to stay, how to get around, the best places to eat, and awesome activities that are affordable.

While you can scour the web yourself to find a travel blog that matches your interests and budget, we wanted to make it even easier for you. Our list of the top travel blogs highlights the travels of a wide range of people whose journey varies from backpacking adventures to beaches in Bora Bora.

Instead of focusing on the most popular blogs or the most engaged Instagrammers whose sites are likely to close to the top of any Google search anyway, we carefully considered several different factors in curating the list of our top picks. Here are some of the essential features each of these travel blogs has:

What makes a good travel blogger?

We thought it was important that our featured blogs used a writing style that was conversational yet descriptive. It’s great that anyone can start their blog, but that does mean that in your searching, you’ll come across blogs where the writing leaves something to be desired. Many other bloggers use their site as an actual diary and turn out a high number of blog posts, which can be tedious to sift through. We’ve avoided bloggers who are churning out content for clicks and focused on the ones that seem dedicated to quality over quantity.

Our favorite travel blogs use language that paints a picture and get us excited to start our next adventure, not content specially produced to drive traffic to a site.

What are travel blogs good for?

Guidebooks are excellent, but they often leave us with more questions and no easy way to reach out to the author for follow-up or to interact with other people who are using the same guidebook. Bloggers, on the other hand, are much more accessible. The blogs we chose all allow readers to comment on their posts to interact with the blogger and other readers. We think it’s essential to see what kinds of conversation spark from a post. Often we get to see a completely different perspective of the same place through a commenter’s point of view. A commenter may even have other suggestions for similar places or offer effective alternatives to make the same experience easier or cheaper. We also think commenters come up with great questions for the blogger that can be helpful if you’re planning your trip.

Our featured bloggers interact with their readers in their post comments and often on social media sites like Instagram or Twitter.

Who are travel bloggers?

We mentioned earlier how much we appreciate that bloggers come from all different backgrounds. Even if you’re traveling to the same location, considerations like your interests, budget, and who you’re going with can lead two travelers to seek very different experiences.

Think of it this way: you’re all set on taking a trip to Los Angeles with your family, including two young children. Your experience, from how you get there and where you stay to what restaurants and places you choose are going to differ vastly from someone taking the same trip with their friends.

We made it a point to include perspectives from a wide range of people. We’ve got blogs that focus on adventure and backpacking, traveling on a budget, couples, and families who travel together. Our favorite bloggers take vacations from lavish to the economy and everywhere in between.

You’ll also notice that the travel style of each of our bloggers differs significantly. Let’s face it, some of us are planners who want to make sure we see and do everything on a trip while others among us want to be able to show up somewhere and have a great time. If the latter sounds more appealing, you’ll love the Lazy Travel Blog. Patryk and Karolina detail their adventures in traveling with their baby. While their descriptive narratives and beautiful pictures showcase what’s great about the different places they visit, they also keep it real about the frustrations behind the trips.

On the other hand, on The Blonde Abroad, you’ll enjoy the picturesque sunset and cocktail pictures alongside meticulously planned travel trips to boutique hotels and Instagrammable gourmet meals. From what to pack, what to wear and who to go with, there’s no detail that hasn’t been carefully decided upon.

Although we think these blogs represent a great variety of ages, experiences, and budgets, some of the blogs on our list also feature guest writers, broadening the demographics even further. We made sure to include a couple of blogs that frequently invite other travel enthusiasts to contribute. Nomadic Matt is a male in his 20s, so his experiences may not match yours, but he has a feature on solo female travel where women contribute, which helps him reach a broader audience.

How resourceful are travel blogs?

It’s great to get inspired to visit a place yourself after reading about another traveler’s experiences. Whether it’s soaking up the sun a beach with a good book or racing down a snowy hill on a snowboard with the fresh mountain air stinging your cheeks, just imagining ourselves in the new environment is a great place to start.

Unfortunately, there is a fair amount of planning that goes into traveling. Even the laziest of vacationers will need to plan how to get around, eat, and where to sleep at their destination. Here’s where we’ve tried to make things even easier for you: the travel blogs we chose for our list don’t just give you great pictures and descriptive writing, they include some great travel resources that will help you plan a similar trip with the least amount of frustration possible.

What are the most popular blog topics?

These blogs include guides that are location-specific or just great general information from frequent travels to make the most of your trip and help stretch your budget to get the most from your money. In his blog Off the Path, Sebastian includes a whole page of helpful links that he uses to book transportation and accommodations in different countries. We had no idea about some of these country-specific websites, so if you’re traveling abroad, this is a must-view. If you have next-level wanderlust and decide it’s time to uproot entirely, Liz at Young Adventuress has a whole page dedicated to the ins and outs of moving abroad.

On top of that, there are helpful tips on packing, suggestions for places, and activities that are best for specific people and advice for staying safe wherever your travels take you.

Overall, our list of the best travel blogs is a great place to start as you begin to compile all the information you might need to plan a trip away. We love travel blogs that provide a more personal account of worldwide destinations from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds that are significantly different from mainstream publications.

With this list, you can find the most detailed and well-written blogs, showcasing material from all types of travelers, whether it’s a backpacker on a shoestring budget, a wealthy couple, or a jet setting twenty-something.

Although the posts in these blogs may not have been through the same rigorous editorial processes as newspapers, magazines, and guidebooks, their pieces offer unique perspectives and up-to-date knowledge that moves away from the formal style we are so used to reading in official publications.

What is the best travel blog?

So what are you waiting for? There’s no need to waste time doing endless Google searches and weeding through the ‘hashtag ads’ to find genuine content written by dedicated travelers. It’s time to stop being envious of your friend’s beach pictures and the adventures of Instagram explorers in cozy cafes on cobbled roads. Check out these blogs today, and we guarantee you’ll get inspiration to travel along with helpful advice for planning and taking your trip.

Captions for blog list