Ever wondered what the largest travel blogs are in terms of readership?

Following the success of our 2019 Content Creator survey and the many revenue-related insights, we wanted to focus on the largest travel blogs by readership. 

It is easy to be carried away by the social media following or beautiful Instagram photos, but these metrics may be disconnected from the traffic that a website receives or from how a travel blog makes money. 

In this travel blog ranking, we wanted to highlight the largest travel blogs by readership and make sure the claims were supported with verified data for an average period to account for monthly seasonality.

We decided to pick page views as the metric to rank blogs because it is the closest way to measure readership. If a reader lands on a site through an online search and then stays to read several other articles we wanted this to be reflected. 

It is also important to highlight that the definition of a travel blog, as opposed to an online publication, is becoming increasingly blurred and it is difficult to ascertain where the cutoff point between the two lies. This will be discussed in more detail later.

In order to maintain the integrity of the ranking, we did not include sites that appeared to be travel-related but whose content was not. For a site to qualify as a travel blog, more than 80% of its top-20 pages as shown in Ahrefs had to be travel related. 

If you are interested in the methodology used, you can scroll to the bottom of the post for more details.

Largest travel blogs Jul-Dec 2019

Below is the list of the 50 largest travel blogs by readership. All data corresponds to the monthly average for the last six months of 2019.

Largest travel blogs Jul-Dec 2019 by niche

In order to classify travel blogs by niche, we defined several categories and asked each website owner to select only one niche for their blog. 

We know that there are travel blogs that focus on more than one category (e.g. this website focuses on luxury travel, on premium-class airline reviews and on off-beat destinations) and that there are some that are more niched-down and don’t fall under any of the categories we defined. 

We also verified the category picked by the blog’s owner was in line with the content of the blog by looking at the top 50 articles as ranked by Ahrefs for the blog.

Luxury Travel	Adventure Travel	Accessible Travel
1. Travel Passionate	1. The Broke Backpacker	1. Spin the Globe
2. Once in a Lifetime Journey	2. The Planet D	2. Curb free with Cory
3. A Luxury Travel Blog	3. Journey Era
Solo Female Travel	General Travel	Sustainable Travel
1. Travel Fashion Girl	1. Out of Town Blog	1. A Little Adrift
2. The Blonde Abroad	2. Mi viaje por el mundo	2. Worldly Adventurer
3. Be My Travel Muse	3. MakeTimeToSeeTheWorld	3. Drink Tea & Travel
Boomer & Beyond	Budget Travel	Couples Travel
1. Points and Travel	1. The Poor Traveler	1. Retire Early and Travel
2. Albom Adventures	2. Roaming Around the World	2. Local Adventurer
3. Freedom56Travel		3. Practical Wanderlust
Food & Travel	Family Travel	Destination Blog
1. Our Awesome Planet	1. Y Travel Blog	1. La Jolla Mom
2. Will Fly for Food	2. Full Suitcase	2. Uncovering PA
3. Bacon is Magic	3. Trips with Tykes	3. California Through my Lens
Wellness Travel
1. Just One Way Ticket
2. Mostly Amelie
3. The Yogi Wanderer

In addition to the above categories, there was also a category for LGBT+ travel and one for Solo Male travel but since we did not get enough entries from relatively large blogs we did not include them above this time. 

Notwithstanding, the top-50 ranking above contains the largest blogs in both of these categories for reference. We hope that as this ranking becomes more established, we can include more blogs in these two niches.

Methodology for data collection

Here is what went on behind the scenes to put together the ranking of the largest travel blogs.

Data source

The participation in this ranking was completely voluntary and the decision of each website owner. An online form was used to collect the details of each participant and all the information collected has and will continue to be kept anonymous. 

In this first round, we contacted large blogs that were included in similar rankings before via email to let them know about the effort and shared the submission form in blogging forums to foster participation.

The readership claims were backed up by screenshots of Google Analytics provided by each website owner to substantiate users and page views for the date range (July to December 2019). The average was calculated by simply dividing the total figure by 6.

Submissions that did not include clear data or used a different source were not accepted for consistency and reliability. 

Data for Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR) were sourced from Moz and Ahrefs respectively and included for reference, although we have previously proved that DA and traffic may not necessarily always correlate.

Participants who were interested, were entered into two draws from the sponsor of this effort, KAYAK Affiliate Network.

1. 10 vouchers of $100 to be used on HotelsCombined
2. 5 consultation sessions of 2h with an expert from the KAYAK Group team to help bloggers improve conversions or make the most of their affiliate efforts

The winners will be selected from the short-listed blogs.

What is a travel blog

In order to determine whether a site was travel-related or not, we looked at the top-20 articles globally as available on Ahrefs on its Site Explorer. If more than 20% of the top 20 articles of the website were not directly or indirectly related to travel, the website was excluded.

The type of content that was not considered travel-related includes, but is not exclusive to, articles about quotes, social media (on not travel-related topics), making money online, blogging, online trading, make up, etc. 

Despite a site claiming to be in the travel niche, if more than 4 articles in the top-20 were unrelated to travel, we did not consider the site in the ranking.

Niches were self-selected by each website owner. In future editions, we might refine this definition by looking at objective metrics to avoid false claims.

The definition of what is a travel blog is a difficult one. Other rankings have previously included websites that, in our opinion, are not blogs. 

While the line between the two is increasingly becoming less obvious, we have for now included websites that are primarily run by individuals or small groups and excluded those sites that are owned by companies such as The Points Guy. In the future, we might refine this definition further.

This would be a great addition to your travel blogging Pinterest boards!