How Much Do Travel Writers Make?

Can you really make good money as a travel blogger or freelance writer? How much money can travel writers make in a year?

Back when I started out writing for magazines in the pre-internet age, the answers were "Usually not" and "Not much." About the only people I ran into who were full-time travel writers making enough to live comfortably—much less support a family—were staff editors and guidebook authors. There just weren't enough ways to make steady earnings unless you were stringing together a lot of big assignments from major publications month after month.

Then when the internet removed all the gatekeepers and the permission publishing model, the number of people who could at least support themselves started to climb each year. Back when I published the first edition of Travel Writing 2.0 back in 2010, there was starting to be a little chatter about how we might soon spot this mythical beast called the "six-figure travel blogger." Some people had managed to build up enough of a following and get enough monetized traffic that they were earning what a corporate suit near the top of the org chart could pull in. Not Wall Street money maybe, but respectable.

The future was looking bright. Plus the job was a whole lot more fun than the alternatives.

See, that was always the trade-off. Through a bit of hustle and creative lifestyle design, it wasn't all that hard to get to a point where you could travel around the world, sometimes for free thanks to press trips and hosting. You went where you wanted, did what you wanted, and made enough to pay the bills. Your social media feeds made all your old friends jealous.

You weren't going to earn enough to save for retirement or buy a house though. That's something the office workers did, a trade-off for their cubicle life. After all, "remote workers" were still an oddity outside the world of online creatives like us.

As I finish up the third edition of Travel Writing 2.0 though, we've found that we can have the good life and enjoy a good life too. We can live in six countries over twelve months and still have lots of cash left over at the end of the year, even if we go live in Europe half that time. We can buy some nice clothes, contribute to a retirement fund, and yes, buy a house. Heck, I even put a kid through college in the USA on my travel writing income—something that I would have thought was impossible when I first started down this path in the 1990s.

Some of us are taking half the freebies we used to as well because it's easier to just control our own schedule, travel slowly, and cover whatever we want. Our business is throwing off enough cash that we don't need to compromise. If the place isn't pulling us in emotionally, we skip it unless there's a good financial or personal reason to visit.

So it's time to take stock of our situation with some real data and to celebrate the good news. I happen to know a lot of travel bloggers and writers, plus I belong to a fair number of organizations, so I hit up my network and asked people in our field to share some real numbers. More than 200 of them responded, so I think the findings below are a reliable "state of the industry" picture for travel content creators.

The picture is brighter than it was in 2016, a lot brighter than it was in 2010, the other times I went through this exercise. As far as methodology goes, this is not a scientific survey. Some people don't want to share what they're earning. Plus there's a clear survivor bias: the ex-travel-writers who quit and took a "real job" again won't show up here at all.

Those of us left standing in the post-pandemic era are looking respectably healthy though when you look at our income.

Actual Earnings for Travel Writers, Bloggers, and Videographers

Like most travel writers, I didn't study journalism at university, but I do know enough not to bury the lede. So I'm going to start off with the most important part: actual earnings for travel bloggers and writers.

First up, I'm featuring the full-time writers because that's what most of the successful ones are. Some still hang onto their day job because of benefits, professional satisfaction, or other reasons, but most seem to break free once the income makes that viable. Here's how much they're making:

I will freely admit that I was surprised by these results. I knew there were a lot more of us earning six figures than there were six years ago, but I wasn't so optimistic that I thought it would be the number one answer. In comparison, that category was less than 20% back in 2016 and nearly one-third of the writers said they were earning between $26,000 and $40,000.

I actually got scolded this time for not making the top category "$200,000 or more" because that's what a few of them would have picked if it were an option. Assuming I do this again down the line, I need to go up a few notches.

The second-highest this time was $40-$59K, which is respectable and well above the most common response before, but $80-99K was in the #3 spot, with 18%. The top three categories comprise more than half the respondents.

That's the picture for full-timers. So what about those that are doing it part-time for whatever reason? Well, not too shabby either, but closer to where it was last time around.

For many of the part-time travel writers, this is supplemental income, a side hustle on top of a day job or just something they do for fun to get some free travel. For others, they have parenting duties or other obligations that keep them from going all-in. So it's only natural that the highest categories of answers are at the bottom of the scale, under $40K per year.

There are a few outliers though, so kudos to those few who have managed to earn the big bucks without putting so much time in front of the laptop.

One conclusion you can probably take from this is, if you want to earn big, you'll probably need to go all-in eventually. Travel writing is not a great choice if you're shooting for a four-hour workweek. It's hard to publish travel articles, photos, and videos consistently without a fair bit of personal involvement.

What's the Primary Income Source?

Freelancing for others is on the decline, blogging is way up. Now that might elicit a "Duh," but it was the predictive impetus for the title of my book when Travel Writing 2.0 made its debut in 2010. As I predicted 12 years ago, newspaper travel sections are almost completely gone, travel magazines have lost most of their readers and influence, and guidebooks are barely hanging on. Digital publications are where almost everyone goes for travel advice.

This doesn't mean that freelance writing itself is dead though, far from it in fact. I'm still getting plenty of gigs and some of them pay quite well. It's just that my name isn't showing up in print much anymore. It's mostly virtual ink. Many of the old brands are still around, just with different owners and with a stronger focus on digital, not dead trees. It feels like there's more work out there for content creators than there has ever been, including company sites, newsletters, and blogs.

So it's probably no surprise that most travel content creators fall into two camps that intersect. They're travel bloggers, freelance writers, or both.

There are some other categories in there, but they pale in comparison to those two big ones. The main difference is that freelance work seems to attract more part-time writers than full-time ones and the part-timers were more often making money from courses or teaching. Perhaps that's because once you set it up, courses are a more passive income source than a blog or trading time for money freelancing. A few are staff writers or editors for both categories.

What I found really interesting in this survey is how nobody mentioned video earnings, even though that had its own category (0 replies) and although I didn't put podcasting as its own category, it didn't show up as an income source in the next round below. While these two types of media get an outsized amount of hype and media coverage, they're not providing enough money to live on for any of these 207 survey responders. Perhaps it's early days, but they're just much tougher to monetize for now.

Where Else Do Travel Writing Earnings Come From?

The primary source of income only tells part of the story of course. Ask almost anyone who has some travel content creation term on their business card where the money comes from and the answer will be some form of "Lots of places." When I asked people how many sources they had gotten paid from just in the last three months, here were the answers:

If that's not the picture of a scrappy entrepreneur right there, I don't know what is. These are not big agencies with lots of clients. They're one-person and two-person operations most of the time, perhaps with some contractors working as content contributors or virtual assistants. They're pulling in cash from a staggering number of places though. This chart makes my heart flutter with joy because as I've said 1,000 times, the only way to feel secure and sleep well at night as a travel writer of any kind is to have multiple sources of income. In multiple categories too.

Hats off to the top 7% of full-timers: they got paid from 21 or more organizations in one quarter!

I didn't leave it at that though. I asked everyone which categories those sources were in and which ones had paid off for them in the past three months. There's a nice level of diversity here:

Once again, a few findings that were expected and a few that surprised me. I really didn't expect affiliate programs to be paying off for more people than display/network ads, especially given the high income levels that we saw earlier. A lot of six-figure bloggers are earning real bank from Mediavine and Adthrive but it looks like affiliate commissions are adding up for even more bloggers.

It's gratifying to see brand and destination partnerships back in the lead since that category took a big nosedive during the Covid era when both travel and travel marketing budgets stalled.

I did expect freelance writing to decline, but 15% is lower than I would have thought. It tells me bloggers are doing so well with their own sites that they don't need to bother with working for others unless they enjoy it or want to see their byline show up elsewhere.

What will probably surprise some is how insignificant video earnings are among earners high and low. I answered my own survey so I'm apparently one of the few who makes anything at all from video. (A whopping average of $35 a month from YouTube, sometimes some scraps from Instagram.) That category got a 2% response rate as an income source, lower than leading tours or photo sales.

If you want to make a good living as a content creator, writing posts that have effective affiliate links is apparently a great strategy. But becoming a YouTuber or TikTok star is definitely not the path of least resistance! Come for the narcissism and stay for the...we're not sure what. Brand campaign obligations?

For comparison, here's how the part-timers are making money:

Now we know who is taking all those freelance assignments, right? That makes a whole lot of sense for many reasons. You generally have plenty of time to finish a freelance article, you get paid quicker than you will from a new blog, and it doesn't take so much admin work to write an article as it does for a blog post. Much of the time you don't even need to furnish photos.

Some of the part-timers are clearly bloggers though, people earning money from the usual sources and 10% are getting paid for partnerships with brands or destinations. Then there's a mix of other things, including "other" that's who knows what, but once again, video earnings are paltry. Even stock photo sales earn more people money than that.

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Travel Writer Jobs

Usually when I'm putting up a post on this travel writing blog I don't even bother doing keyword research. There are so few terms pulling in high volume in this field that it's easier to just write advice articles and do interviews without trying to rank for a term that 10 people a month are searching for.

There are a few exceptions though and it turns out the highest search volume in our niche is "travel writing jobs." That's both hilarious and ironic since probably 99% of the travel writers and bloggers out there are self-employed.

Sure, some have staff jobs at magazines or online publications focused on travel, but for every one of those there are 99 other people who are working for themselves. When we meet a travel editor or staff writer at some conference or event, it's kind of like spotting a celebrity or a rare bird in the wild. In fact a conference—usually one where the editors have been invited to speak—is about the only time you'll run into a travel writer on salary unless you live in NYC or London and go to a lot of press events.

The easist answer to the question of "Where do I find a travel writing job?" is "In the mirror." You'll probably have to hire yourself rather than waiting for permission. Most of the people making good money as travel content creators are bloggers or freelance writers who got to a point of success after years of effort.

Sure, they do a few other things to make a living too, but for most part they're self-employed self-starters who are hustling hard. They're making money from the content they create whether that's text, photos, videos, books, a podcast, or in-person advice. Sometimes all of them over the course of a year.

Yes there are freelance writing jobs out there that are advertised, but they would more accurately be described as "gigs." They're assigned on a contract basis, without any long-term commitment or benefits. Your most successful freelance travel writers are stringing together dozens of these gigs per year, maybe 100, often with articles that are in motion simultaneously. See our travel writing resources page for places that list travel writer jobs. You might even find a salaried one or two—but usually with the requirement that you've already been working for years as an editor or features writer somewhere else.

Where We're Headed...Maybe

Making predictions is always going to be a risky endeavor, so I'm not going to go out on a limb on anything here. But based on what I'm seeing in the results of this survey and from chatter with people earning more than I am, it's still an okay time to be a freelancer, but a great time to be a travel blogger who has been at it for at least three years. I don't see any drastic changes coming on either of those fronts.

A few things have changed since the last time I surveyed travel writers though. Thousands of brands and destinations have realized that investing in bloggers with a following has a much better ROI than putting an ad in a magazine or joining 14 other advertisers on a single page of a trade publication's website. I've got an easy button for you here if you want to rope in 10 or 20 travel bloggers to get your message out.

Instagram had a great run but it feels like the appeal has soured as those same brands and destinations see that it doesn't translate into business or bookings. (Physical products like make-up and fashion are a different story, with a much shorter sales cycle.) Maybe IG will get back to being a photo site again instead of a me-too video site clone and the trend will reverse. Regardless, setting out to become a a social media "influencer" is probably much riskier than trying to become a successful content creator, especially since you have very little control over the platform.

Twitter is a meltdown mess as I write this. For most bloggers, Pinterest has gone from the belle of the ball to a sad stepsister cleaning the basement. While some TikTok influencers are getting some cash, there's a risk the app will get banned by half the world and it's still a platform that very few people over 25 are engaged on actively.

Otherwise, what has worked for years tends to keep working. As Nassim Taleb pointed out in Antifragile, new technology comes and goes, but we've been eating with a fork since the ninth century, with a spoon even longer. People will still be doing so long after we're dead. Good travel stories about interesting places will hopefully live on. People will keep reading books. And as long as people keep traveling, they're going to keep looking for reliable travel advice from people who know what they're talking about.

If anything is "dead," as pundits love to claim things to be, it's the age of the generalist. It's really hard to be a plain white bread travel writer these days who doesn't have any area of expertise, no discernable niche, no "best of the best" designation they can cling to. If you don't stand for anything, don't know more than most about something, and are not a go-to person on a place or topic, it's going to become more and more difficult to compete in this noisy media world. No matter what that media may be.

If a bot can do your job, you might not have a job much longer. So do great work instead.

As Seth Godin says, "Go make a ruckus." You're much more likely to get noticed. And get paid.

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