The Amateur Traveler is an online travel show that focuses primarily on travel destinations and the best places to travel to.
It covers everything from knowing what to put on your Chicago dog when you go to the Windy City to swimming with whales in Tonga. It includes a weekly audio podcast, a video podcast and a blog with quite a lot of travel photography.
The audio podcast started in 2005 and was downloaded more than 1.74 million times in 2022. The blog covers destinations in long form written photo-rich posts.
Amateur Traveler has previous won a Lowell Thomas travel journalism award from the Society of American Travel Writers and also earned me a SMITTY award from Travel+Leisure magazine as the “best independent travel journalist / blogger”. It also topped the audio category in the 2017 NATJA awards.
Amateur Traveler is also used to teach English at Oxford University and is part of the English proficiency exam for the Thailand State department.
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Amateur Traveler is one of the longest-running travel podcasts and blogs. I hope you enjoy it!
Hey Chris, great to have one of the OGs of the travel blogging world (and a fellow software engineer) here!
I’m curious how you manage such an extensive blog with over a decade of content! Any tips for people with long-term blogs to keep their content up-to-date and organized as their content libraries grow?
Good question. Organized is not that hard, just set your categories and stick with them. up-to-date is a constant struggle. For blog posts you can update them, concentrating on the blogs that get the most traffic. For podcasts, you need to refresh them with a newer episode periodically.
Hey Chris, still looking good! :)
Thanks Alastair :-)
I can see how your podcast would be good for English learners. I'm an ESL teacher always looking for good listening exercises
Amateur Traveler has been used by the Canadian and German school systems, and a few Universities like Oxford as part of their English courses. Also if you want a job with the Thailand Foreign Ministry you will need to listen to two episodes and you will be graded as part of their English comprehension exam.
Blog is very nice