Great news everybody! Today, I have an amazing announcement: The accommodation booking site Hostelworld and I have teamed up together and I am pleased to announce that Hostelworld is now the official accommodation booking site of Nomadic Matt. Ever since I started traveling, I’ve been using Hostelworld. They’ve always had the best user interface, most availability, and largest selection of hostels, budget hotels, and guesthouses. When I go to book hostels, my brain enters autopilot and types in Hostelworld. I’ve [...]

Last year, I become a G Adventures Wanderer in Residence. Essentially, along with a few other bloggers, I became an official blogging partner of the company. I was very excited because back in 2003, I took a trip to Costa Rica and it forever changed my life. It gave me the travel bug and set me on the path that put me here. And the trip was with G Adventures so they hold a special place in my heart. As [...]

Two years ago, I traveled around Europe using a rail pass. I had met a lot of travelers who used these rail passes and in my never ending quest to save money on travel, I wanted to see if using a rail pass would save me money. Back then, it did. The post received a few comments from other travelers about how using Eurail passes had ruined their trips. They didn’t save money, they couldn’t take certain trains, or they [...]

Today, I celebrate five years of traveling around the world. In 2006, I left home and set out on a round the world adventure that was supposed to last a year. Here I am five years later, just as nomadic as ever. To ring in this day, I wanted to do something more than just write a blog post reflecting on my years of travel. So I decided that since I got to travel, you should travel too, so: I [...]

I get a lot of contest offers in my inbox each week and most of them get deleted. I occasionally follow up with a few that seem interesting but rarely does anything ever pan out. They usually have crazy rules, want me to do everything, or have a bad prize. The last time I had a good contest was when I gave away a video camera away last year. That’s how infrequent these are. But once in awhile a good [...]

I get bombarded with PR emails every day; I see a lot of travel websites and get offers to try a lot of products. I get to see the good, the bad, and the ones with potential. People always ask me which companies I work with and which ones are the best. I wrote about my favorite travel companies early last year, but I thought I’d expand the list and name my favorite travel companies of 2010. Seat Guru – [...]

In the last 4 years traveling the world, I’ve taken over 10,000 photos. I know compared to some people that isn’t a lot (I have friends who take over 10,000 pictures every few months) but photography has never been my focus. When I first started to travel, I took a lot of photos but then I realized I’d rather take pictures in my mind than always be stuck behind a lens. Yet I mostly don’t take a lot of pictures [...]

I’ve been traveling around with my iPhone for a few months now and playing around with the various travel apps to see which are worth using. To be honest, most suck. They don’t work well, they cost too much, or are too basic. Moreover, there are just too many redundant apps. How many apps do we need to track a flight or change dollars into Euros? It’s really a shame, too, because travelers are getting more wired, and useful iPhone [...]

Despite all my trips around Europe, I could never say I’ve “railed” across the continent. I am usually so scattered in my plans that I take few trains and lots of planes. I end up in Venice and decide Amsterdam is fun and fly back there. My plans are never consistent enough for trains. But on this trip I really wanted to see Europe by train. I get a lot of questions about European train travel and the value of [...]

When I started this website last year, my original goal was the be a travel writer. This website was just going to be the vehicle to get me book deals, guidebook work, and magazine articles. I was going to be the next Bill Bryson or at least the young traveler’s Rick Steves. To get my name out there, I figured I should start with some online work. That is what people do these days. I guest-posted everywhere, and I tried [...]