Lots of people think travel writing is the ultimate dream job. It can be – so long as you have another one that pays the bills.
Let’s get something straight.
That travel writer you follow on Instagram? The one whose words appear in the weekend lift-out?
The one photographed in a private plunge pool in the Maldives beside a floating breakfast, with a laptop open in a nearby chair, with a caption reading something along the lines of ‘office for the day’?
She (or he) is lying to you.
I know, because I am that writer.
Sometimes, I swap the plunge pool for a bubble-filled bathtub, or the bubble-filled bathtub for a cocktail bar, or the cocktail bar for a business-class lounge, or the business-class lounge for a spacious sun-bleached deck with a view of a glittering world city, but always, always, I am lying to you.
And so are most of the other travel writers you know.
The notion that freelance travel writing is a viable full-time career – that you can sustain a life, pay a mortgage, and support a family purely from the words you write about the places you visit – is BS.
Those bylines in prestigious publications you covet?
They’re most likely penned by someone who is either living below the poverty line or has another source of income … whether they’re willing to admit that or not.
Many travel writers I know – even big names, whom I won’t out here – have anecdotes to share about staying in high-end properties but going hungry because the host hasn’t included meals in the famil package.
I still remember the irony of sleeping in trillion thread count cotton sheets in a $2,900 a night property outside of Byron Bay to write this story but not being able to afford to eat anything other than packet soup.
(That tom yum soup I mention in the story is the ‘ingredients purchased locally’.)
At that point, I was owed something like five figures from stories commissioned by multiple publications which had been submitted but not yet published (or paid for).
I’d love to say this was an exceptional set of circumstances, but that figure is not unusual.
And yet this myth of the gallivanting freelance travel writer, living a charmed and glamorous life, persists.
(Want more? Read 13 truths and 1 lie about being a travel writer.)
We so badly want to believe that this lifestyle exists.
But it’s a seductive and damaging lie, because it creates unrealistic expectations.
It actively prevents aspiring travel writers from building careers that work, by making them feel like failures for needing to source income from elsewhere.
Why the myth exists
The economics of travel writing have been in structural decline for decades.
The demands of the digital age sent them into freefall.
(Here, I’m talking editorial writing, not content creation, which is an altogether different beast.)
What was already a precarious living when I started out in the 1990s is close to perilous now.
A major part of the problem is that word rates have not kept pace with inflation.
In absolute terms, they’ve gone backwards.
The standard rates that the better publications are offering today (AUD 0.70 to 1.00 a word) are what publications were paying 30 years ago.
Bear in mind, too, that there are many publications out there paying much less than this, or still expecting writers to work ‘for exposure’. Yes, really.
According to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s calculator, a writer today would need to be earning AUD 1.50 to 2.14 per word, if their pay packet had simply kept pace with inflation.
And even if they were earning that much per word, something else which has shifted is that 2000-word features, which used to be commissioned regularly, are now few and far between.
Readers’ dwindling attention spans mean that the average length of story I’m now asked to write is between 800 to 1000 words, but shorter pieces typically require just as much legwork.
This winding back happens via a slow, steady process of erosion.
For instance, late last year, the editor of one of the publications to which I contribute delivered its stable of writers a pay cut via email.
‘(We’re) doing a slight redesign with a view to making more of our photographs,’ the editor wrote.
‘This is going to have a minor impact on word counts for our stories.’
Cover stories, the email went on to explain, would drop from 2000 to 1800 words, others from 1400 to 1200, and still others from 1000 to 800 words, and so on.
So, is it possible to pick up a camera and earn back that lost revenue?
Short answer, no. With no budget for photos, images are typically supplied by hotels, tour companies, host destinations, or the like.
So why wouldn’t the publication want to be ‘making more’ of such photos? They’re free!
Doing the maths
A different form of calculus involves looking at the average FTE average weekly earnings, which is now around $2,051.10, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
That’s an annual salary of $106,657.20 per year.
On the face of it, for a writer being paid an average of $0.50 per word, that would seem to require writing about 4,100 words per week, which is certainly ambitious, but not unattainable.
But factor in costs like superannuation, four weeks of paid leave, insurance, equipment, and other business expenses that would normally be paid for by an employer, and you suddenly need to be billing $192,000 each year to earn an equivalent pay packet, according to the GoingSolo calculator.
This equates to required weekly income of $3,692.30, or around 7,385 words per working week.
That’s more than seven 1000-word stories, for 48 weeks straight.
Some writers might tackle this occasionally, but it’s not sustainable, or even very likely.
To provide some perspective, last year, according to my substantiation figures prepared for ongoing membership of the Australian Society of Travel Writers, I published and was paid for only 13,702 travel-related words.
The year before, I was more active, publishing and being paid for 66,630 words.
Yet that larger figure is not even a fifth of the total number of words I’d be required to publish (354,480) to be earning the average weekly wage as calculated above.
How is everyone else doing? No idea (but I’d love to know).
What I can tell you is that to maintain ASTW membership, writers must publish at least 8,000 paid words (or 12 paid articles of 500+ words) within the previous 12 months.
Up to four paid photos/videos can count as 250 words each towards this total.
Which is a little bit more like it.
TravMedia’s industry survey
Amid the fizz and bubble of the 2026 IMM Summit, I found that figures from the latest TravMedia industry survey didn’t quite add up.
One of the survey results was that two-thirds (67%) of journalists have seen their word rate stay the same, or increase, over the past 10 years.
This was mystifying when you consider what editors claim to be paying the freelance writers upon whom they now rely.
Writer Rachael Oakes-Ash, who presented the findings with TravMedia’s Julie Ott, said that 23 to 31 per cent of editors were now paying more than 50 cents per word – as if this represented progress.
“More editors are paying by the article, though, than they did 10 years ago,” she added.
What that means is you’ll be paid for a package incorporating words, photos and (increasingly) social media which doesn’t fairly compensate you for all the individual components.
Such as the request I had from a magazine last year for a 1700-word story, along with 12 ‘high quality’ original images, from an overseas trip I was paying for myself, in exchange for the grand sum of $650.
Despite the dodgy economics, the supply of willing writers has exploded and all of them are chasing the same vanishing number of commissions.
Amid this environment, the travel writing industry has built an elaborate mythology, with courses and workshops designed to fuel those ‘get paid to travel’ dreams.
The reality is that teaching people how to become a travel writer is more profitable than being one.
Travel writing isn’t unique in this. The same dynamic exists in most creative fields.
But aspiring travel writers are especially vulnerable, because the fantasy of freedom, adventure and a pay cheque is so potent that we keep buying it long past the point of reason.
Why people lie about it
Travel writers lie for several interconnected reasons.
The first relates to identity. Calling yourself a full-time travel writer signals that you’re a nomad, a free spirit, a worldly creative, someone whose life isn’t confined to a cubicle and a watercooler.
Admitting that you supplement your travel writing income with copywriting, corporate writing, science writing, English teaching, or a full-time job as a psychologist in a prison (which is my exact situation since February) feels like a confession of failure, rather than simple economics.
Travel writing’s aspirational business model also demands it.
If you’re selling a travel writing course, a mentoring program, a mastermind group, or a book about how to break into this competitive industry, the implicit promise is that you’ve cracked it.
You’re selling the dream that full-time travel writing is achievable and sustainable and wonderful and – hey presto! – you are living proof.
Admitting otherwise would undermine the product, so your duplicity is commercially incentivised.
Social media also punishes complexity.
The nuanced truth – that you’re doing DoorDash, or tutoring, or shelf-stacking, or editing, or any number of other paid gigs so you can keep travelling and writing about it – doesn’t neatly fit in a caption.
It’s not inspirational. It’s not what people want to hear.
Yet a caption that reads, ‘Travel writer – currently in Hokkaido’ evokes envy and perpetuates the dream. So that’s what we type, right before we hit ‘post’.
Hacking the pace
I’ve talked to many budding travel writers who are so bewildered and frustrated that they can’t get out of second gear, when everyone else seems to be living the dream.
Reminder: everyone else, including me, is lying.
I tell them that the ‘day job as failure’ narrative conveniently ignores the role of privilege in who gets to write full-time.
There might be a small number of very successful full-time travel writers who do nothing else. I get that.
But I’ll guarantee that if you dig a little deeper, you’ll often uncover invisible support systems.
Family wealth. A high-earning spouse. An inheritance. A redundancy payout. A retirement fund. A house with two spare bedrooms that are rented out. Fast-vanishing savings. Grants, fellowships, or prizes that buy some time.
None of this makes their writing less valuable but pretending these support systems don’t exist creates an impossible and unfair standard.
It suggests that if you just wanted it badly enough, if you were just committed enough, you could make it work.
When we say that ‘real’ travel writers should be able to support themselves through their writing alone, we’re saying that travel writing should only be accessible to people with financial cushions.
We’re excluding everyone who wasn’t born into circumstances that allow them to gamble their financial security on the shifting sands of editors’ whims.
Tough love for travel writers
If you’re an aspiring travel writer, here are 6 things you need to understand:
- The writers who sustain themselves in ‘travel’ almost never do so through the single revenue stream of editorial alone. They’re simultaneously pitching features, writing guidebook chapters, producing content for tourism boards, blogging, licensing photographs, publishing newsletters, doing travel PR consultancy, speaking at events, and more. And that’s only if they’re not working outside the industry altogether.
- The word rate problem isn’t temporary. You might comfort yourself with the idea that rates will improve once you have better clips, more experience, a more solid platform. If that is what’s keeping you going, I’m sorry to say that you’re shit out of luck. Top-tier outlets do pay more per word, but the ceiling is lower than you think. The economics are structurally broken.
- Your day job is not your enemy. It is your sugar daddy. The travel writing career that works for most people is one that is funded by income from elsewhere. I greatly resent that what I earn from my day job effectively goes towards helping prop up Murdoch’s empire. And Nine’s, to mention but a couple. But this is today’s business model. Treat it as such. And get over it, or not.
- Stop asking the question, ‘How do I get paid to be a full-time travel writer?’ As the calculations above reveal, you can’t. Instead, take the trips you’d be taking for business or pleasure anyway, and ask the question, ‘How do I monetise the travel I’m already doing?’ This is a far more sensible question.
- Getting to go on more press trips is not the solution. Every aspiring travel writer’s fantasy involves being flown business class to some exotic location and being put up in a six-star resort, then writing about it. These gigs do exist – I’ve been on them. But they’re not an everyday occurrence and they do come with strings. Plus, you only get paid for your words, not your time. And, as I’ve already explained, sometimes you don’t get fed.
- Your longevity in the industry requires honesty about the numbers. Sit down and do the maths. How many articles per year, at what rates, in what outlets, would you need to publish to cover your mortgage, food, bills, health insurance, and other costs of living? Then ask yourself, ‘What percentage of established travel writers are publishing at that volume and at those rates?’ If you’ve been paying attention, you already know the answer.
While you’re here …
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