✨ Welcome back to our series, TravMedia's Travel Writer of the Week! ✨
Each week, we'll be shining a spotlight on one of the incredibly talented, passionate, and inspiring Journalists or Editors from our amazing community.
This week, we'd like to shine the spotlight on freelance travel writer - Phil Thomas!
We hope you enjoy - happy reading !!
Where are you based?
Cambridge, UK
What outlets do you write for? Who is your audience? What are your travel specialties?
Over the last year I've written for publications including The Independent, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, BBC Travel, Much Better Adventures and Food, Wine & Travel.
I'm most drawn to destinations and stories hiding in plain sight, overlooked regions, or the corners of famous places most visitors never reach. My audience are those who are culturally curious for these less obvious stories and destinations.
Heritage, food and the outdoors are recurring themes of my writing, as is LGBTQ+ travel, particularly stories that broaden inclusivity in ways that feel genuine rather than performative.
Are you in-house or freelance (or both)?
I'm a freelancer.
What are your professional pet peeves?
Probably nothing that probably hasn't been stated here a hundred times previously. Shrinking rates, opaque commissioning processes and being ghosted after spending days tailoring a pitch to a publication top my list. The recent explosion of AI-generated slop across the industry feels pretty suffocating too, although probably even more so for editors than writers.
My most recent bee in bonnet arose from a well-know publication, which has proclaimed they won't take travel stories from freelancers who've been on any press trip in the past three years. We're loftily encouraged us to go and forge our own path. Must be a nice view from that ivory tower.
In your past professional life you were …
Travel journalism is actually my third career. I started out as a translator before realising there are only so many German agricultural manuals you can translate before losing the will to live. Plot spoiler, it's not many!
I then spent more than fifteen years in Financial Services across the UK, Europe and the US, leading sizeable Operations and Marketing teams. I'd always blogged and undertook journalism training on the side but never had the nerve to make the leap properly.
Eventually I took a sabbatical from the job to travel around the world and came back with a very different perspective on what I wanted life to look like. Just as well really, as I returned to a redundancy notice.
That was the trigger to start a dedicated travel blog – Someone Else's Country - after years of procrastinating and that was the first step to pitching, writing and everything that's followed.
Where would you like to return to?
Patagonia. There are days I suspect I'd be perfectly happy never leaving again.
What's on your bucket list?
Nepal and Bhutan. I've yet to see a photograph from either that doesn't immediately trigger wanderlust or outright jealousy.
Where do you travel for fun?
I find the Deep South of the US completely irresistible - the music, food and storytelling from every sub-culture are endlessly fascinating. That said, it's nigh-on impossible to switch off from thinking “there's a great story here” with practically every conversation.
Your funniest (or most harrowing) travel story is …
On my first backpacking trip through Eastern Europe, I fell asleep on the overnight train from Minsk to Kyiv while the service was running several hours late.
At the border, Belarusian officials informed me I had (accidentally) overstayed my visa by two hours. We didn't share common language so this quickly became an elaborate game of charades...albeit theirs involved rifles!
My initial interrogation took place while I was still lying in my bunk and things escalated when a teenage conscript frogmarched me off the train. Walking along a floodlit border platform in pyjamas and flip-flops, flanked by armed guards, wasn't my most dignified travel moment.
Two hours later and a pretty fruitless interrogation later, I was allowed back onboard with a large red “CANCELLED” stamp across my visa. I haven't been back.
What advice would you give your younger professional self?
Stop talking yourself out of the career change you really want to make. Most journalists I know arrived here via complicated, slightly chaotic routes – there's definitely no 'one size fits all'.
I also spent too long treating journalism as though it required abandoning everything I'd done previously. In reality, the opposite is true. Research-heavy corporate roles sharpened my ability to interrogate trends and data, while marketing experience helped me think more strategically about angles, audiences and positioning. And after years leading teams and battling unreasonable deadlines, the resilience needed to deal with rejection - which is an essential part of the freelance job description - feels a lot less personal.
What nugget would you like to add that we haven't touched on?
I think newer writers often assume travel journalism is a closed shop. Freelancing feels bloody lonely at first.
Finding community changed everything for me. Networking still doesn't come naturally, (I'm an introvert pretending otherwise most of the time) but joining organisations like the British Guild of Travel Writers and The Travel Writing Skool has been invaluable, as has been attending Travmedia events, notably IMM, which widened my network in a spectacularly useful way.
I don't think there's been a single event (webinar or in-person) I've attended that hasn't generated either a useful contact, a fresh idea or reassurance that everyone else has bugbears that aren't a million miles removed from my own.
How best should people contact you?
Email – someoneelsescountry@gmail.com - or via my Instagram are equally good.
