The Substack Renaissance in Travel Media Comes With a Catch

Skift Take Substack provides space for travel writers with strong points of view honed from years of experience. The best ones embrace the freedom and avoid quick takes. There is a very welcome development in travel media. A lot of the useful travel writing and insights I am seeing are coming from independent newsletters on Substack. Some are written by fans with an educated point of view, and some by former editors who took their taste with them into a medium that lets them be more of themselves. Thanks to the algorithmic distribution, a smaller, homespun newsletter can quickly find its audience of the right people, similar to other interest-graph driven platforms. The economics are beginning to work on both sides of the equation. For the writer, an engaged audience willing to read, or better yet pay for, your thoughts can turn a side hustle into a full-time thing. For the hotel, a newsletter with 10,000 engaged subscribers who actually book trips is often worth more than a glossy feature seen by millions who exist only at the awareness stage of the funnel. And as I have argued in this column before, these insights and reviews index well