About
What Travel Pen is
Not a travel guide. Not a review site. The honest version of a place, written by someone who was actually there.
Where the idea came from
Most travel content has a problem. It is written for everyone, which means it is useful for no one. A city guide for Barcelona covers the same ten things regardless of whether you are there for a weekend with a partner, a week with young kids, or a solo trip with no itinerary. The destination is the same. The experience is completely different.
Travel Pen was built around one idea: tag the destination and the reason for going. Someone planning a honeymoon in Santorini should be reading someone who went to Santorini on a honeymoon. Someone backpacking Southeast Asia on a budget should be reading someone who did exactly that, not a glossy resort review from a press trip.
That specificity is what makes it useful. And the only way to get it right is to have real people writing real stories about trips they actually took.
What we are here for
Travel Pen exists to get the right travel story in front of the right person at the right time. Written by someone who went there, for the same reason they are going.
What we stand for
How we do it
Real stories only
You have to have actually been there. Every story on Travel Pen is written by someone with first-hand experience of the place and the trip. No exceptions.
Context is everything
A story about Lisbon written by someone on a city break is not the same as one written by someone doing a month of slow travel. We tag both the destination and the reason for going, so you find the one that actually applies to you.
Written by travellers, read by travellers
There is no editorial team deciding which destinations matter. The people who write on Travel Pen are the same people who read it. That keeps it honest.
No ads, no sponsored content
We do not take sponsored posts dressed up as editorial. If someone recommends something on Travel Pen, it is because it was worth recommending.
Got a trip worth writing about?
If you have been somewhere and you have something honest to say about it, we want to publish it. Tag your destination, tag your reason for going, and write it for the person who is planning the same trip.
Find out how it works or get in touch if you have questions.