Whether your idea of a perfect vacation is sipping high-end cocktails at a five-star resort in Madrid or choking down a bowl of ayahuasca in a cave in Panama, there's a travel influencer out there for you.
The 14 travel influencers below are widely considered the best in the world. They range from van-lifers to international jet-setters, but each captures the spirit of exploration and adventure of travel in their own way.
I'm starting this list with Johnny Jet, because he's the O.G. travel influencer—Jet's been about that life since 1995, before many travel influencers were even born. Jet, real name John Discala, parlayed his first-one-in status into a travel empire. He's appeared on every major network, hosted his own show, Hot Spots, on the Travel Channel, and his website is updated constantly with everything from general news about travel, to credit card recommendation, to money-saving tips.
Louis Cole, aka "Fun for Louis," has attracted over two million followers for his laid-back travelog YouTube videos where he skateboards, snowboards, and tramps all over the world. Cole has an engaging personal style that works perfectly with his stunt-style videos, where he does things like crossing the English Channel on an electric surfboard and riding a solar-powered scooter from the UK to Italy.
Trek Trendy has over a million YouTube subscribers on his travel channel. While he focuses on high-end, ultra-luxury travel like a trip on the Orient Express (complete with caviar and tuxedos) he's so down-to-earth and friendly, it never feels like he's rubbing it in your face.
Grace and Matt, aka The Golden Road, are the opposite end of the travel spectrum from Trek Trendy. Instead of paying six-figures for a ticket on the Orient Express, this traveling couple tour the U.S. with their dogs and posting the result on their Instagram. They take very long walks. They renovate their school bus. Sometimes they camp. Sometimes they don’t. Throughout, they embark on attainable travel adventures that are presented in a friendly style.
French photographer Alex Strohl's travel instagram regularly features breathtakingly beautiful images, from Hawaii, to Colorado, to the Pyrénées and everywhere else. If you're into the pure aesthetic wonderment of travel, point your browser to Strohl's Insta—it's way better than your great-aunt's Facebook pics from that time she went to Rome.
Kiki, aka The Blonde Abroad, started her popular travel blog in 2011, and she's been everywhere since, from Guatemala to Iceland. Kiki's goal is to "help women find the confidence to travel the world," and her site is packed with no-nonsense tips for solo traveling along with inspiring photography and genial, conversational writing.
Most travel influencers create content about their destinations, but Noel Phillips’ passion is the airplanes. He travels on obscure, little known, often dangerous airlines (and sometimes trains) and invites you to sit beside him for the ride. Dude has an infectious passion for aviation, and watching him do things like fly a transatlantic flight on Algeria’s airline will really make you appreciate the luxury and opulence of Spirit Air.
Whether he's camping in a parking garage, posting up on an abandoned highway, or testing out an air-conditioned tent, YouTuber Steve Wallis lives his motto: Always be camping. He mainly engages in "stealth camping," i.e. setting up shop in places he's not allowed to, like a police station, a donation bin, and a roundabout. The "will he get caught?" aspect of his videos make them uniquely suspenseful.
My idea of traveling is very different from Angelica Blick’s. She’s about high-end, luxury touring and looking fabulous when you’re doing it. We probably wouldn’t like hanging out, but I love her Instagram anyway. Her carefully composed and styled pictures and videos are a look into another world that’s more stylish and dreamlike than my own.
Kuga's Travel was created by a Japanese YouTuber who visits interesting places and mainly films the train cars and airplane cabins that take them there, with no voice over, only written captions. So if you want to take a relaxing point-of-view ride on Australia's most expensive train, a Chicago L train, or a British hovercraft, and you don't want any yammering, check out Kuga's Travel.
Maybe "urban exploring" doesn't count as "travel," but I'm putting Urbex Hill here anyway; call the internet-list police if you must. Hill's passion is taking deep dives into decrepit, abandoned, and scary-ass places in and around Cleveland. While his videos sometimes get into the supernatural, ghosts are the last things I'd be afraid of in some of his locations.
I'm not a huge fan of YouTuber Lost Leblanc, but his slickly produced videos like BILLIONAIRE for a week - Most EXPENSIVE of DUBAI and How YOU can Travel Full Time & Make Money on Social Media represent a very popular subset of trendy travel influencer. I find his style smarmy and cheesy, but he has more than two million followers and gets paid to do luxury travel, so what do I know?
There's a subset of first world travel YouTubers whose bag is touring locations both the U.S. State Department and common sense strongly suggest you avoid. These kinds of accounts raise troubling ethical questions too complex to get into here, but if you can deal with it, the content they produce is fascinating. YouTuber Indigo Traveller is a New Zealander who seeks out active war zones, the most "dangerous" neighborhoods, and other places he shouldn't be, and seems to try to take a non-exploitative, empathetic view of the people there.
The Carpetbagger is a traveler after my own heart. A self-described "genuine yankee moron," he visits every tourist trap and unusual attraction to bring back fun, unapologetically nerdy vlogs of huge balls of twine, walk-in elephants, and all manner of other unusual attractions.
