5 Travel Bloggers Who Built Real Businesses

In 1972, Tony and Maureen Wheeler traveled by land, all the way from Europe to Australia. The next year, back home, they wrote down everything about that trip in a small booklet, just 94 pages long, with pale blue cardboard covers. They called it Across Asia on the Cheap. 

People later said this little booklet was the very first real piece of what we now call the travel content industry, long before anyone had ever heard the term travel blogger.

As the company grew, they needed writers who could describe countries just as well as the Wheelers did, even in places the Wheelers themselves had never actually visited. That started with a guide to India in 1981.

One thing made their guides stand out though: real personality. A writer named Geoff Crowther used to add his own honest opinions right into the guidebooks, and people say that habit is part of why Lonely Planet became so popular. 

Journalists later even made up a word for it, "Geoffness," to describe something that later travel guides just didn't have anymore.

In the end, the Wheelers sold their company for about £105 million total, across two separate deals. That's the biggest number in this whole story.

By 1999, they had sold 30 million guidebooks. Writers even got a share of the profits, and at company parties in Melbourne, some Lonely Planet writers actually showed up in limousines. 

Then in 2007, the Wheelers, along with a partner named John Singleton, sold 75% of the company to BBC Worldwide, for about £63 million. By then, the company was publishing 500 different guidebook titles, and had even started making television shows.

In 2011, BBC Worldwide bought the remaining 25% too, for £42.1 million (A$67.2 million). By that point, the company had 140 different apps, and its website had 8.5 million people visiting every month, numbers no single travel blogger's site would ever come close to matching.

Guillebeau dropped out of high school, and started college when he was just 16 years old. Then, from 2002 to 2006, he volunteered with an organization called Mercy Ships, working in West Africa.

In 2008, he started a blog called The Art of Non-Conformity. Like almost every travel blogger who eventually builds something bigger, he used it to write about a real goal he'd set for himself, visiting every single one of the 193 countries in the world, before turning 35.

In June 2008, he gave away a free ebook through his blog, called A Brief Guide to World Domination. Over 100,000 people downloaded it. That is a large number generating no revenue, and the rest of the case answers what to do with it.

In 2010, he started something called the Travel Hacking Cartel. It sold subscribers information on frequent-flyer programs and travel deals, which meant the money he earned actually funded the exact same travel he was writing about, a clever loop that most travel bloggers never manage to pull off, and one this particular travel blogger built entirely by himself.

In May 2012, a publisher called Crown Business published his book, The $100 Startup. It reached number 6 in its category on the New York Times Best Seller list. By April 2025, he had published nine books total.

From 2011 to 2022, he ran an annual event in Portland called the World Domination Summit. Over those ten years, more than 10,000 people attended, and speakers included well-known names like Brené Brown and Gretchen Rubin. 

In 2012, he gave every single person who attended a $100 bill, to either spend on a new project or donate to someone else. In 2013, he started a foundation that gave out grants worth up to $12,000 each.

He finally finished his goal in Norway, on his 35th birthday, in April 2013. He paid for it all mostly through his own self-employment income, and airline miles he had collected.

Jessica Nabongo was born in Detroit, to parents from Uganda, and she already had her own passport by the time she was four or five years old.

Before all this, she worked in the pharmaceutical field, taught English in Japan, and worked for a United Nations group called the Food and Agriculture Organization. By 2016, she had already visited 60 countries. Then, in February 2017, she made a decision: she was going to visit every single country in the entire world.

Here's the problem she faced though. By 2017, there were already a lot of skilled travel bloggers writing about similar places online. So her answer was something nobody else could copy once she achieved it, a full record, plus a point of view the category hadn't really shown much of before, documented one country at a time, as she actually traveled.

She reached her 195th and final country, the Seychelles, on October 6, 2019, at 35 years old, having started her official attempt back in February 2017. A group called Nomad Mania, which informally checks these kinds of records, accepted her claim after doing random spot checks.

In 2022, the National Geographic Society published her book, The Catch Me If You Can: One Woman's Journey to Every Country in the World. At the same time, she started a travel agency called Jet Black, which builds small group trips to Africa, and she also partnered with hotels and other hospitality businesses.

Her story got covered by NBC News, CNN Travel, the BBC, Outside, and Vibe, more press than most travel bloggers ever receive for a single achievement. Her work has even been studied in academic writing about Black women travel influencers.