Travel Blogs That Accept Guest Posts

Travel is the soft one, measured against seven others

Guest post advice usually treats every niche as equally crowded. It is not. We ran eight topic-specific versions of this query in September 2026, pulled the Ahrefs Domain Rating of every organic result on each page, and took the median per term.

Every one of these terms sits in the same 10 to 100 searches a month band, so the difficulty gap is not a volume effect. Travel is 21 points of median Domain Rating easier than education on an identical query pattern.

That matters in two directions. If you are writing about this subject, travel is the version of the page worth building. If you are looking for placements, travel is the niche where the accepting blogs are easiest to surface, because fewer heavy publishers have buried them.

Half the page one is not blogs at all

Here is what actually ranks, measured in September 2026:

Four of the nine results sell placements. Four are genuine travel blogs publishing their own submission terms. One is a compiled list. Somebody searching this phrase hoping to find blogs to pitch has to filter that themselves, and the marketplaces are deliberately designed to look like the blogs.

Note also that the two lightest results on the page, at DR 13 and DR 19, sit above a DR 71 platform and two marketplaces above DR 50. This page is not ordered by authority, which is the usual sign that relevance is doing the work.

Telling a blog from a marketplace

The test takes about fifteen seconds and it is the single most useful habit in this work. Read what the page asks you to supply.

A publication asks for a subject, an angle, a draft or an outline, and something about you. It wants to know what the piece is. A marketplace asks for a target URL, an anchor text, and sometimes a budget. It does not care what the piece is, because the piece is a wrapper for the link.

The second check is the site around the submission page. A blog has hundreds of ordinary travel articles with photographs and opinions. A marketplace has pages about domain authority tiers, turnaround times and bulk pricing. Both may use the phrase guest post equally often.

What the accepting blogs actually ask for

The four genuine blogs on this page differ in tone but converge on the same requirements, and they are stricter than most people expect.

First-hand experience of the destination. Not research, not a compiled itinerary, but somewhere you have been, with the specific detail that proves it. This is the requirement that eliminates most submissions immediately.

A real author with a traceable presence. Travel blogs have been targeted by link resellers for a decade and have learned to check. An author bio pointing at a profile with no history reads as exactly what it is.

And restraint on the link. Most will allow one contextual link or one in the bio, not both, and not inside the opening. A pitch that leads with where the link goes tells the editor which of the two categories above you belong to.

What gets rejected

Generic destination round-ups are the largest category. Ten Things To Do In a city the writer has never visited is instantly recognisable to somebody who lives there or has covered it for years.

Anything written primarily for a search engine comes next. Repeated exact phrases, headings that read as queries, and a paragraph of preamble before the first useful sentence all mark a piece as produced for ranking rather than reading.

Then the mechanical failures: no name, wrong editor, a pitch addressed to a site whose subject does not match, and attachments nobody asked for. These are avoidable and they account for a surprising share of silence. Our guide to the guest post pitch covers the format that avoids them.

The paid placement question

Four of the nine results on this page sell placements, so the question is unavoidable. The honest position is that paying changes what you are buying.

An editorial post on a blog with a genuine readership is a recommendation. A paid slot on a site whose business is selling slots is an advertisement, and search engines have had many years of practice recognising the second category. The price is often similar, which is what makes the comparison misleading.

If you do pay, pay a real publication with a real audience, and treat being turned down occasionally as a good sign. A site that accepts everything has accepted everyone. We go through the numbers behind this in what backlinks cost and in guest posting services.

Building the shortlist

Start from blogs whose recent posts overlap with places you have genuinely been. That single filter does more for acceptance rates than any amount of volume, because it makes the first-hand requirement automatic rather than a problem to solve.

Then check the site is alive. A submissions page from four years ago on a blog that stopped publishing two years ago is a common dead end, and it is the reason compiled lists decay so quickly. Look at the date of the most recent post, not the date on the guidelines.

Expect the shortlist to run to dozens rather than a handful. Travel blogs add a filter most niches do not, in that many want a complete draft before committing, so the effort per placement is higher and the volume needs to match.

The pitch itself

Short, specific and about them. Name the piece you are proposing, name the destination, say in one line why you are the person to write it, and stop. Editors decide in the first two sentences and everything after that is either confirmation or noise.

Do not attach a draft unless the guidelines ask for one, and do not send the same message to five blogs with the destination swapped. Travel editors talk to each other, and the pattern is recognisable.

If a blog does not answer, one follow-up after a week is reasonable and a second is not. Our email outreach guide covers the timing, and link building email templates has openings that do not read as templates.

Doing the outreach part yourself

The slow work here is not writing. It is finding travel blogs that are still publishing, still accepting, and relevant to somewhere you have actually been, then getting to the person who reads submissions.

That is what MentionAgent does. It finds relevant sites, pulls a contact, writes the pitch, sends it, and replies arrive in your own inbox. The Domain Rating measurements in the tables above come from the same research step it runs before it contacts anything.

It will not go to Lisbon for you, and the first-hand requirement is real. Contact work opens the door; the piece still has to be worth publishing.

If you want a compiled starting list instead, our travel guest posting sites page names specific blogs, and guest posting covers the whole process end to end.

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