Slow Travel Blogs – A brief overview – TRAVEL SLOWLY

Blogs are short-lived websites. The reason is that they are mostly operated by individual people without commercial interest. On their blogs, the self-declared authors publish different articles in chronological order to one main topic. About Slow Travel, one can find the by me often cited blog of the U.S. American Pauline Kenny, who invented the term in the year 2000 (sloweurope.com) as well as the Slow Travel Manifestof the British travel author Nicky Gardner (slowtraveleurope.eu). Over the years, there have occurred many Slow Travel blogs, which don’t exist anymore today. Especially from 2009, when Nicky Gardner spread the term in travel magazines, a lot of people adopted the term. Nevertheless, today just a handful of active Slow Travel blogs can be found.

English blogs

In the past years, English-speaking bloggers dedicate themselves more and more topics like sustainability and mindfulness. There are also plenty of blogs about the topic Slow Living. This is a lifestyle which emphasizes conscious experiencing and slowing down in daily live. Currently, the topic Slow Travel is poorly represented, which might be connected to the already above mentioned short-live of blogs. Since 2014, Steph Dyson from Great Britain writes about the slow and meaningful travel (worldlyadventurer.com). Charlie Marchant, also from the UK, found her passion for Slow Travel in the year 2012 (charlieontravel.com). She prefers long-term stays and sustainability during her travels. Since 2016, travel blogger Daniela is writing about less touristic places on ipanematravels.com. Since the same year, the Canadian Alison Cornford-Matheson and Andrew Matheson call themselves Slow Traveler (cheeseweb.eu). Polish blogger Dee writes (vanillapapers.net, since 2017) and the U.S. American Lisa Lubin write also about Slow Travel (llworldtour.com, since 2019).

German blogs

2014, the book “The Idle Traveler” of the British author Dan Kieran was published in Germany with the title “Slow Travel. Die Kunst des Reisens”. For many travel blogger the publication of the book was reason to think and write about the Slow Travel topic. In the year 2016, the two bloggers John and Marc from 1thingtodo.de additionally started a survey on the topic Slow Travel. About 40 German travel bloggers took part on a Slow Travel test and dealt thematically with the travel trend. These plentiful blog articles also helped spreading the term Slow Travel in the German-speaking area.

The bloggers who dedicate themselves completely to Slow Travel are currently Matthias Derhakte with traveltelling.net (since 2015), Janna Kamphof with jannakamphof.nl (since 2016), Monika and Petar Fuchs with travelworldonline.de (since 2016) and Maria Kapeller with kofferpacken.at (since about 2017). Since 2020, Christiane Barthels also writes about Slow Travel (der-2te-blick.de). She already wrote a guest article for my blog.