3.8M
unique monthly readers across web and newsletter, verified against Similarweb ranking in the top 0.5% of travel publications.
Issue 184 · This Week in Faraway Places
About Faraway Places
An independent travel publication, founded in a Lisbon apartment in 2014 by editor-in-chief Marisol Hartley and three travel writers who believed travelers deserved more than listicles.
Photograph: The Tagus from the Largo de Santa Catarina, Lisbon — where the first issue was edited.
Chapter One · The Founding
Three writers, one apartment above the Tagus.
In the spring of 2014, Marisol Hartley and two colleagues moved their desks into a top-floor apartment on Rua da Boavista. They had left staff jobs at glossy magazines and were tired of the same brief: ten things to do in a city they'd never lived in, written on deadline by a freelancer paid per piece.
The bet was small. If travelers were willing to read a 6,000-word guide about a single neighborhood in Oaxaca, perhaps they were also willing to be told the truth — that the famous beach was overrun, that the beloved riad had slipped, that the best meal in town happened in a place with no sign on the door. The first issue went out to 412 email addresses on a Sunday morning. Almost all of them opened it.
Ten years later we still work the same way. We hire writers who live where they write. We pay for our own hotels and our own meals. We do not run sponsored placements in the editorial columns. And we update every guide on a fourteen-month cycle, because recommendations age quickly and honesty ages faster.
What follows is the editorial scaffolding that makes that promise hold.
The Editorial Standards
How we report, fact-check, and keep our promises to readers.
Four rules govern every guide, hotel review, and itinerary we publish. They are not aspirations. They are the conditions a piece has to meet before we run it, and the conditions under which we will pull it down.
-
01
No sponsored placements in editorial.
Every hotel, tour, and restaurant recommendation is paid for out-of-pocket by the writer who reviews it. We do not run paid placements, advertorial, or "partner content" inside our guides. If a property or operator is mentioned because we chose to mention it, it is because we chose to mention it.
-
02
Reporting from people who live there.
Our 240+ correspondents live in 92 countries. They are not flown in for a press trip and handed a list of hotel suites. They are residents — people with rent, language classes, and a regular table at the corner restaurant. They write from a place because it is their place.
-
03
A 14-month fact-check cycle.
Restaurants close. Hotels change management. Neighborhoods shift. Every guide is revisited on a fourteen-month rotation, with on-the-ground visits within the last eighteen months before each republish. Out-of-date pieces are pulled, updated, or retired — and we say so in the editor's note.
-
04
Double-editor review, every piece.
The average guide runs to 6,400 words of original reporting and is reviewed by at least two editors before publication: one for accuracy and sourcing, one for voice and structure. We do not run pieces we have not argued about.
Correspondent Elena Carvajal, Mexico City desk — has written for Faraway Places since 2017.
The Correspondents
240 writers in 92 countries. They live where they write.
Most of our guides arrive not from a wire service or a freelance marketplace, but from a small studio apartment in Oaxaca, a shared house in Cape Town, a long-term let in Kyoto. Our correspondents are former tour guides, former chefs, former archaeologists, former aid workers — readers first, writers second. We pay them on contract, edit their work carefully, and credit them by name.
When a guide mentions a neighborhood bakery, a particular tide pool, or a hilltop walk, it usually means our writer has been going there for years. That is the texture we cannot buy, and the texture we cannot fake.
Meet the network →By the Numbers
Reader scale and engagement, presented as a small editorial sidebar of facts.
The figures below are the ones press, prospective correspondents, and skeptical first-time readers ask about most. They are updated annually.
4.2pages
average session depth — readers who arrive tend to read deeply, not bounce.
71%
return-visit rate among newsletter subscribers within 30 days of opening.
14,200+
original long-form destination guides indexed and updated on the fourteen-month cycle.
Awards & Press
Third-party recognition that contextualizes the journalism.
We are wary of trophy cases, but the following honors and citations matter because they came from editors and juries outside our walls.
Gold, 2023
Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award
Coverage of Patagonia — judged by the Society of American Travel Writers' international panel.
2022 & 2024
SATW Destination Article of the Year
Recognized twice by the Society of American Travel Writers for destination reporting.
Press · 2024
Condé Nast Traveler
Named one of "The 25 Best Travel Websites" in the magazine's 2024 editor's picks.
Press · Ongoing
The Atlantic · BBC Travel · The New York Times
Cited by the NYT "52 Places" editorial team and regularly referenced in Atlantic and BBC Travel features.
Faraway Places has been profitable and reader-supported since 2014. Sixty-two percent of our revenue comes from memberships and newsletter sponsorships — not display advertising — which is what makes the no-sponsored-placements rule in editorial possible.
— Marisol Hartley, Editor-in-Chief, Lisbon