Some people plan every hour of an itinerary. Others book a flight and figure things out as they go. Some chase food, while others chase history, nature, or adventure. These 10 travel podcasts reflect variety too, offering perspectives for every kind of traveler.
1. Travel with Rick Steves: Public radio veteran
Rick Steves had already spent decades as a tour guide and guidebook author when he launched Travel with Rick Steves on public radio in 2005. The show runs a full hour every week, mixing call in questions from listeners with conversations with guest experts and music. Producer Tim Tattan has run it since the first broadcast. By its twelfth year on air, the show had grown from a handful of stations to 424 public radio stations nationwide.
One of my favorite segments takes listeners inside Newgrange for the winter solstice. It is an ancient Irish passage tomb where, for 17 minutes at dawn, sunlight reaches the burial chamber. Where his TV segments work like travel brochures, the guidebooks behind them go several layers deeper on the same destinations. Fun fact: Rick Steves once donated a 24 unit, $4 million Lynnwood apartment complex to the YWCA.
2. Zero To Travel: Nomad life interviews
Jason Moore launched Zero To Travel in 2013 after years of seasonal work as an adventure travel guide, aiming the show at people who have built unconventional lives on the road. The format is mostly one-on-one interviews, with a new guest most weeks alongside occasional solo episodes.
Moore built the Location Indie community alongside the show, teaming up with Travis Sherry of Extra Pack of Peanuts to bring two of podcasting’s earliest budget travel audiences together. Much of the catalog leans on solo travel, backpacking alone or quitting a job with no plan beyond a plane ticket. On the show, guest Alastair Humphreys once described the pure wanderlust behind cycling 46,000 miles across the globe over four years. Fun fact: Zero To Travel has picked up a Best Travel Podcast nomination from iHeartRadio, alongside its recognition from The Washington Post, Travel + Leisure, The Telegraph, and Forbes.
3. Women Who Travel: Candid women’s stories
Condé Nast Traveler launched Women Who Travel in 2017 with editor Lale Arikoglu as host. The premise is women interviewing women about the trips that changed their lives. Fellow editor Meredith Carey shared hosting duties in the early seasons before Arikoglu took over full time. Episodes run weekly, mixing studio interviews with occasional live tapings.
Jessica Nabongo, the first Black woman documented to visit all 195 countries in the world, appeared on the show. She travelled to 89 of those countries alone, and her appearances on the show have fed into its recurring thread on solo travel for women. Other guests on the show also contributed fascinating stories, like food writer Hawa Hassan, who traced recipes through the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, and Lebanon for a cookbook about displacement. Fun fact: On her own social media bio, Arikoglu describes the show, per one listener’s review, as just a bunch of gals yakking.
4. Luxury Travel Insider: Elite hospitality access
Sarah Groen has personally traveled to 100 countries. She founded Bell and Bly Travel in 2019, a boutique advisory for entrepreneurs and executives too busy to plan their own vacations. A year later, she started the Luxury Travel Insider podcast. New episodes go out weekly, each centered on a specific destination or property.
Guest Robert Bowe spent 33 years at Ashford Castle in Ireland, one of the grand names in European luxury travel, and on the show he talks about the castle’s history and the guests who have passed through it. Jamie Gaymer, a conservation manager at an ultra luxe African safari lodge, has described the daily balancing act of keeping wildlife and five star guests on the same land. Fun fact: Bell and Bly Travel, the advisory Groen runs, is named after two historical women explorers, Gertrude Bell and Nellie Bly.
5. Curious Tourism: Responsible Travel Podcast: Ethical tourism questions
Erin Hynes was already working as a travel writer in Toronto when she teamed up with producer Kattie Laur in late 2018 to launch the show, then called ‘Alpaca My Bags’, and rebranded it to Curious Tourism a few years later. She turned the format toward the industry itself instead of another destination roundup. Apple added it to its New and Noteworthy list in 2019. Hynes writes under the name Pina Travels, a nickname Italian locals gave her at a hostel job in Venice when she was a teenager, and her blog under that name pairs destination guides with explainers on overtourism and travel privilege.
Guest Lily Girma, founder of Tourism Lens, explained social washing in an episode, where a resort’s marketed sustainability and its daily practices do not always match. Another guest, Taryn Eyton, a Leave No Trace Master Educator, unpacked what ‘leave no trace’ actually means, and asked whether gatekeeping the outdoors protects wild places or just keeps people out. Fun fact: Curious Tourism also recapped Season 3 of HBO’s The White Lotus in a bonus series.
6. The Amateur Traveler: Weekly destination guides
Chris Christensen started Amateur Traveler in July 2005, after a Memorial Day barbecue convinced him that every good story his friends told was somehow about travel. He recorded the earliest episodes alongside a full time job as an engineering executive in Silicon Valley.
Christensen has personally traveled to 79 countries. He also leads an annual group trip, once routing listeners through Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan along old Silk Road cities. The show earned him a spot in the Podcast Hall of Fame and a Travel and Leisure SMITTY Award in 2014, the same year he was invited to a Travel Blogger Summit at the White House. Fun fact: Amateur Traveler episodes are used to teach English at Oxford University and form part of the English language proficiency test administered by Thailand’s Foreign Ministry.
7. The Travel Diaries: Celebrity travel memories
Holly Rubenstein spent years as an entertainment correspondent for Reuters and the BBC, interviewing subjects from George Clooney to Sir David Attenborough, before turning to travel. She launched The Travel Diaries with a format built on seven fixed chapters of a guest’s travel life, starting with an early childhood memory and ending on whatever destination still tops their bucket list. Her first season brought on Sir Richard Branson, polar explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and chef Raymond Blanc.
Chris Packham, on air since the 1980s presenting The Really Wild Show, brought unique travel stories to the format, talking trips centered on conservation instead of leisure. Luxury travel comes up often too, since a good share of Rubenstein’s celebrity guests describe five star trips. Every episode signs off with the same words: It’s wanderlust, guaranteed. Fun fact: When asked what her favorite destination is, Rubenstein picked her hometown of London.
8. Extra Pack of Peanuts: Points and miles
Travis Sherry was teaching English in Japan when he started Extra Pack of Peanuts as a blog in January 2012. The podcast followed fifteen months later, once he was back in the US, as (by his own account) a way to convince well-known travel figures to talk with him. Frequent flyer miles and hotel points were the whole focus at the start, though recent seasons have drifted toward short-term rentals and property investing. Along the way he has crossed into Croatia illegally by accident, nearly run short on blank passport pages trying to leave Singapore, and lost a laptop somewhere in Indonesia.
Each year the show runs a six-part Year in Review series, working through categories like the worst accommodation of the year, a title that once went to a room with a collapsing ceiling. One installment is dedicated entirely to travel statistics, tallying how many nights were spent on the road, how many miles were flown, and how many new countries got checked off. Sherry and his wife Heather also run Haven Hospitality Group, a short term rental business that Condé Nast Traveler and Airbnb have both recognized for its beach properties. Fun fact: Sherry’s first international trip with his son Whit was to Budapest, where he learned firsthand how difficult it is to travel with a jet lagged baby.
9. Armchair Explorer: Cinematic adventure storytelling
Aaron Millar wrote for The Times of London and National Geographic Traveller for over a decade before Armchair Explorer moved him to audio. His travel record includes trekking with Shugendo monks in Japan and descending into a volcano in Iceland. Episodes run as scripted narration over music and field recordings.
The New York Times and The Washington Post have both praised the show, and it has picked up two Webby nominations along with a Travel Broadcaster of the Year award from the British Guild of Travel Writers in 2022. One of Millar’s favourite hikes gets its own episode: the Old Salt Road, a week-long walk from the wine plains of Oltrepò Pavese over the Apennines to the Ligurian coast, where a wrong turn led him into a meadow full of wild horses. Fun fact: The first episode of Armchair Explorer opens with Millar dangling hundreds of feet above the ground on a sheer cliff face in the Colorado Rockies, near his current home, having hiked up in the dark to spend the night on a portaledge bolted into the rock while lightning cracked overhead.
10. The Solo Travel Woman Podcast: Solo women travellers
Sara Straw wrote The Ultimate Solo Travel Woman Guide before turning the same material into The Solo Travel Woman Podcast, mixing solo episodes with guest interviews on subjects like digital nomad life and what she calls solo travel guilt. The show also runs a mentorship program and a beginners course. Straw runs the whole operation from New York City, where her original company, STW Planning, has since expanded corporate events into full service travel planning.
Episodes work through the practical texture of travelling alone, from the art of dining solo in a restaurant full of couples to picking up enough Spanish, French, Italian, or Mandarin to get by. One instalment on solo travel as self-care makes the case for Sedona, Bali, and Iceland as recovery destinations, and weighs how much time to spend alone against the effort of meeting people. Fun fact: Straw has over 15 years of personal solo travel experience.
Every memorable trip includes someone’s recommendation, whether it’s a local pointing you toward a hidden gem or a fellow traveler sharing a favorite place. These travel podcasts capture that same spirit. Sometimes, the best way to discover a place is through the stories of the people who have travelled it and know it best.