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Travel blogs are one of the most popular blog categories.
We’ve all seen the influencers in the wild who share thousands of pictures of themselves posing in beautiful locations or detail their journeys living out of a backpack as digital nomads while they explore the world.
I mean, I get it. The first thing we did when we hit the 10k/month mark was take a trip to Nicaragua to work with a beach view.
Who wouldn’t want to make their living traveling the world and sharing it online?
But I’ll admit…
Sometimes it’s hard to tell who is a successful travel blogger and entrepreneur and who is just a trust fund baby with a nice camera.
Getting paid to share your travel stories definitely sounds too good to be true and oftentimes, it is.
Creating and running a successful, profitable travel blog is more than just posting pretty pictures and writing about your adventures.
Unless you’re a celebrity, no one really cares about what you do–they care about whether you can help them do what they want to do.
And, like with any other kind of blog, there is a lot of research and strategy involved in making a blog successful.
Whenever I met people aspiring to earn an income from their travel photos while I was traveling with the Wifi Tribe and they asked me how to build a profitable blog, I used to tell them this:
Go home.
Stop traveling and go home. Building a business takes a LOT of work and focused time — something that is often difficult to do while traveling and exploring the world.
But that being said, it’s absolutely possible to become a successful blogger in the travel niche, if you know what you’re doing.
In this article, I’m sharing eight examples of successful, popular, and unique travel blogs and how they make money, so you can decide if you’re ready to start up your own travel blog and hit the road.
And these aren’t massive media company blogs. They’re just regular ole’ bloggers. I actually know a few of them personally from my travels.
Some of them have grown into a small team, like us at Create and Go, but they were all started by 1-2 people (and some are still run that way).
I chose these travel blogs specifically because I think that they are great examples of well-designed blogs with a clear purpose, superior content, and excellent monetization strategies.
Even if you decide that the travel niche isn’t right for you, these successful blog examples are a great source of inspiration for bloggers in any niche.
Before we dive into our travel blog examples, let’s take a deeper look at what a travel blog is, how they make money, and why you might want to start one.
What is a Travel Blog?
As you might have guessed, a travel blog is a blog with content that is primarily focused on travel and travel-related topics.
BUT that is still a much broader umbrella of topics than you probably think. We’ll circle back to some of the different topics in the next section.
There are also a lot of blogs with travel content that are not really considered travel blogs.
For example, lifestyle blogs, which tend to be on a variety of different topics, including travel.
But in order for the blog to be considered a travel blog, the travel-related content should be front, center, and obvious from the moment that you hit the website.
Travel bloggers share content generally based around helping people travel… better, cheaper, faster, easier, more luxuriously, etc.
They often share experiences and recommendations, offer tips and advice, and/or discuss important info about specific destinations or travel-related topics.
It’s pretty important to consider the various aspects of this if you’re thinking about starting a travel blog because it can help you determine which direction you want to go in.
For example, being a travel blogger doesn’t mean that you HAVE to share visually appealing content on the reg.
But if you’re hoping to earn commissions from beautiful hotels and Airbnbs around the world, well you’re going to have a much harder time if you aren’t sharing that unique content yourself.
People book trips to the Maldives because of the incredible photos and videos they see others sharing, right? Sell the dream.
But if you’re like me and not so great with a camera, you might want to consider sticking to topics related more to the functionality of travel–like how to travel on a budget, tips for new adventurers, and other topics that are more about planning, and less about building the dream.
And if you’re more interested in sharing stories about your life–ALL aspects of it–and travel just happens to be a part of your life, then you may want to think about starting a lifestyle blog.
Types of Travel Blogs
As I said before, the umbrella niche of travel is quite large, there are many different types of travel blogs out there.
Most travel blogs will include a mix of two or more different categories. I suspect that this is in part because it makes them easier to diversify their monetization strategies.
As we’ve discussed in other posts, it’s important to niche down as much as possible when starting a new blog–and that is especially important in a niche that is as saturated as the travel niche.
Here are some of the most common travel blog categories to consider
Destination or Area-Specific Travel Blog
The name speaks for itself.
This could be a blog about the continent of South America, the country of England, the region of Western Europe, the state of Florida, or the city of New York.
This could also be more landscape or landmark-centered, like a blog about traveling to different beaches, mountains, or forests, or about visiting historical sites, ruins (Machu Picchu), Disneyland, etc.
Lifestyle-Based Travel Blog
This kind of blog blurs the lines a little between travel and lifestyle blogs, but the primary focus is still on travel and travel advice.
This could be any number of lifestyles in combination with travel, such as:
- traveling after retirement,
- the digital nomad lifestyle,
- traveling with kids or family,
- high-end travel lifestyle or budget travel,
- traveling with disabilities,
- RV or road trip travel,
- sustainable travel,
and the list goes on and on.
Activity-Based Travel Blog
This niche has been pretty trendy lately, and it’s a great way to combine your love of travel with your passion for other activities.
A popular trend in recent years has been culinary travel (thank you, Eat, Pray, Love), where activities like cooking classes, fresh food markets, or specific food dishes or restaurants are a major motivator for their travel.
But this really applies to almost any activity:
- from sports like scuba diving or rock climbing,
- to mission or passion-inspired activities like eco-conscious travel efforts, yoga retreat travel, humanitarian or religious activities abroad,
- to pretty much any activity that requires traveling to somewhere else.
Travel Tips or Advice Blog
Finally, a major travel blog niche is travel tips or travel advice.
This is really a catch-all for everything else that we haven’t already covered since the goal of your travel blog should be to help other people with their travel goals.
These blogs might focus on:
- travel guides for different locations,
- or how to get the best travel deals,
- products and services that make travel easier,
- how to plan your travels,
- tips for traveling as a single woman,
and the list goes on.
How Travel Blogs Make Money
Travel blogs make money in much the same way as any other blog, but your niche within the travel category will significantly impact which monetization methods work best for your blog.
It’s also important to note that most readers or visitors won’t be searching for travel advice, travel products, or location information consistently.
Those are topics that people search for on an as-needed basis, so unless your audience is full-time travelers, your site traffic will be heavily influenced by travel trends and seasonality.
Here are the most common ways travel bloggers monetize their blogs:
- Ads
- Affiliate sales
- Sponsored posts
- Brand partnerships
- Their own digital products
- Personalized services
You can read more about each of these individual methods in our article on how to make money blogging.
8 Great Examples of Successful Travel Blogs
In each of these blogs, make sure that you pay attention to the following:
- Blog design
- How the blogger “niched down” to a specific category
- Which categories of travel life the blogger focuses on
- How the blog makes money
- What makes each blog stand out from the crowd
- Why the creator started the blog
I’ve highlighted many of these details for you in each example, and I also tried to find blogs with a variety of different focuses, purposes, and monetization methods.
1. Two Wandering Soles
Two Wandering Soles is a travel blog run by a husband and wife team from Minnesota, Katie and Ben.
They started their blog back in 2014 to share their experiences after quitting their jobs and moving to Colombia, and never looked back.
They’ve spent time traveling in a lot of different ways–from teaching English in South Korea to traveling the US in a camper van they built themselves, to living the digital nomad lifestyle in faraway places, and more.
I had stumbled across their blog when looking for various travel advice over the years, but a friend of mine also works for them. She has taken our Pinterest course to help them increase their exposure on the platform.
Their travel style includes lots of adventure and action, and their wanderlust spirit is contagious and exciting.
They have a wide variety of blogging categories on their site, including travel planning (budgets, packing, deals, safety, and etc.), van life, travel photography, multiple different destinations, working abroad, and more.
They monetize their blog through:
- Ads,
- Affiliate sales, including their “Shop” page, which has their favorite travel related products all in one place
- Sponsored posts
- Brand partnerships
They also receive some free stuff in exchange for review or article mentions, which doesn’t pay the bills, but is certainly an added perk of being a popular travel blogger!
Katie and Ben also post regular blog income reports, which is a great reference for those of you considering starting a travel blog.
2. Nomadic Matt
Nomadic Matt is a single guy with the goal of helping people travel smarter and better.
His content focuses mainly on budget travel and the digital nomad lifestyle, as well as important travel tips.
Matt’s blog has grown tremendously over the years, but what I love about it is that it still has the feeling of a personal blog. He shares his personal advice and opinions often, and I appreciate that.
I once met Nomadic Matt super briefly in Medallín, Colombia during my travels, and I didn’t even really know who he was at the time. But since then, I’ve stumbled across his articles very often in my own travel research.
One of my favorite articles of his is titled: Tulum is Utterly Terrible — and it’s all about how much Tulum, Mexico sucks. He actually titled the permalink /tulum-sucks/ 😂
It’s hilariously honest and if you’ve ever been to Tulum, you’ll understand.
This is the kind of content we need more of in the world. I’d read that honest, transparent sh*t all day long.
Matt monetizes his blog in quite a few different ways, including:
- Ads
- Affiliate sales
- Seven budget travel guidebooks by destination
- Four travel books, including two New York Time best-sellers
- Superstar Blogging, his blogging school for travel bloggers
He surely must have a team or at least a couple of helpers behind the scenes because he’s been at it for years and also has an Amazon book to boot.
3. Uncornered Market
Uncornered Market is run by another husband and wife team, Daniel Noll and Audrey Scott, who hail from San Francisco.
They do things a little differently.
While their blog is built to connect travelers to meaningful experiences abroad, they’ve built the other half of their business to help travel brands and tourism organizations develop products that can provide sustainable and community-driven experiences to travelers.
They essentially offer consulting services, and they’ve worked with companies all over the world.
They were given the Gold award for Best Responsible Tourism Blog from the World Responsible Tourism Awards in 2015, so they have some street cred to back up their responsible tourism advice.
While they primarily blog about sustainability in travel, they also include other topics, like culinary travel and destination-specific advice.
Here’s how they monetize their blog:
- Ads
- Affiliate sales
- Tourism development and consulting services, including:
- Strategic planning
- Product development
- Marketing and campaigns
- Training and facilitation
- Sustainability marketing
- Speaking and keynotes
I like their story and what they are doing because I think that they have a much larger impact than most other travel bloggers.
They give a lot back for the footprints that they have made around the world. From their about us page:
“What was meant to be a 12-18 month creative sabbatical turned into a business and lifestyle of exploring, sharing stories and advocating for travel as a force for good — for the traveler and the communities he visits. We do this through our advisory, blog and social media channels, and on stage at conferences and events.”
4. Her Report
Her Report is run by AnnaMarie, better known as Re, who is a self-proclaimed nomadic journalist.
I featured AnnaMarie on here because she’s a good friend of mine and a generally awesome human being. We met in Colombia while traveling with the Wifi Tribe and have met up again in Bolivia, Mexico, and other random places around the world.
Check out her Instagram stories if you need a good laugh. The girl tells it like it is and that’s what I love about her.
Her blog shares stories about influential women and girls around the world, resources around the world for women and by women, and how to travel like a girl (breaking gender stereotypes).
She writes content on everything from loneliness at work to her van life experiences in Australia during the pandemic.
And they’re honestly just REAL stories, y’all. AnnaMarie is a great writer and she’s funny, honest, and writing the content from a place that she truly believes in.
Here’s how she monetizes her blog:
- Sponsored posts and brand partnerships
- A variety of freelance brand services and consulting, including:
- Optimized copywriting and editing
- Social media management
- Sponsored content and affiliate marketing
- Social media campaigns
Some of the freelancing work that AnnaMarie does is for massive companies like Cosmopolitan, Shape, Fashionista, Bustle, etc. She’s an amazing writer.
She’s a great example of someone monetizing a little differently because she doesn’t make as much money in the passive sense but her freelancing is tied to her travel and personal experiences.
You can find a portfolio of more of her work on her personal website, annamariehoulis.com.
5. Y Travel Blog
Y Travel Blog is run by Caroline and Greg Makepeace, who started out as individual travelers, then became married expat travelers, and now full-time digital nomad travelers with two young kids.
We had to throw a family in the mix because there are SO many travel bloggers sharing their experiences traveling with and raising kids around the world.
Originally from Australia, and now living in the US, they’re a great example of bloggers who have pretty much done it all, and can tell you about it.
They blog about specific destinations, travel tips, how to travel with kids, different travel styles (including RV travel, hotels, camping, road trips, and etc.), and more.
They offer free travel planning guides, free travel planning courses via email series, and paid courses for travelers wanting to teach English in other countries.
Here’s how they monetize their blog:
- Ads
- Sponsored posts
- Affiliate sales
- Paid training courses (**note: these currently appear to be on hold because of the pandemic)
They have an article on their blog about how they make money as a travel blogger if you want their perspective on it.
They also have a huge following on Pinterest and are a great example of a travel blog doing well on that platform.
6. The Poor Traveler
The Poor Traveler is run by Vins and Yosh, two friends from the Philippines who started traveling despite being poor, and now run one of the most popular (by social media and traffic measures) travel blogs in the world.
They offer free travel guides, and blog about budget traveling (based on value, not just the cheapest hacks), travel tips, the latest travel trends (including vaccine passports and etc.), and more.
Their perspective is different from many travel bloggers because they focus on learning from the mistakes they’ve made as travelers from families that didn’t travel.
What immediately sticks out to me when I hit their homepage is their first sentence which does a great job of identifying the struggles that people face when it comes to traveling.
This is one of the strategies that we teach in our blogging courses—highlight the struggles because that is often what your audience is currently experiencing.
It lets them know that they’re in the right place.
While this blog started out as just the two of them, they have now grown to a four-person team (Vins, Yosh, and two additional partners).
Here’s how they monetize their blog:
- Ads
- Affiliate sales
- Sponsored posts and brand partnerships
- Individually arranged ad contracts
7. The Blonde Abroad
Kiersten (better known as Kiki) at The Blonde Abroad is a full-time traveler that shares her unique perspective of traveling solo as a single woman.
She blogs about full-time travel lifestyle, female-specific travel advice, travel adventures, solo travel as a woman, destination-specific travel tips and info, travel fashion, photography, general lifestyle, and more.
I wanted to make sure that a female solo traveler made the list here because it’s a really popular space and I’ve personally met quite a few of them in my personal travels.
A couple of my friends that started in the solo female traveler space include Lauren from Girl Gone Abroad, who often partners with hotels and Airbnb, and Christa from Christa Bella Travels, who has become a digital nomad coach. More Wifi Tribe friends 😉
While the Blonde Abroad started out as a solo blogger, she now seems to have a team working for her, and also allows guest posts.
Here’s how she monetizes her blog:
- Ads
- Affiliate sales
- Sells her own custom lightroom presets
- Has a “travel shop” section on her site with affiliate links to her favorite items
8. My Tan Feet
My Tan Feet was created by couple team Yaison and Samantha, and it’s our only single-destination blog on this list (although there are lots of great ones out there).
Yaison is from Costa Rica, and Samantha is from Washington state but moved to Costa Rica in 2012.
They share everything you need to know about traveling to Costa Rica, including tips, travel advisories, food, cultural events, activities to consider, specific sights and destinations, and everything else in between.
I wanted to include this one on the list because I personally relied very heavily on their blog while I was traveling in Costa Rica earlier this year.
I was hopping around from city to city to places like Samara and looked to their website for advice on which places to visit, which ones to avoid, where to eat, what to see, and everything under the Costa Rican sun.
Here’s how they monetize their blog:
- Affiliate sales
- Sponsored posts and brand partnerships
- They sell their own guide books (PDF format) to major cities in Costa Rica
If you live in a country that isn’t America, consider a travel blog about your country or your region or city. I say that isn’t America just because there will be a bit less competition in other parts of the world.
Is a travel blog right for you?
The first assumption that everyone makes about me when I get asked what I do for a living is that I’m a travel blogger.
That’s because I often meet people while traveling and people just assume that the blogging and the travel is tied together.
As I mentioned before, the camera and I don’t have a very smooth, happy relationship, so I decided long ago that I’d prefer to run my business from behind the computer rather than in front of the camera.
But that’s just me.
I hope this article has helped you get some ideas of whether or not starting a travel blog might be right for you or what kind of travel blog you might start.
If you haven’t started your blog yet, you can visit our free step-by-step tutorial to get started.
You can also check out our guide on how to make money blogging for further reading into how we personally monetize our blogs and the methods that we teach our students.