"A night in the desert with a stranger I met on Couchsurfing"
Firsthand account of sleeping in an ancient cave with a Rastafarian Bedouin in the Jordanian desert. Published October 2015
Published October 2015.
Travel Guides Built on Real Experience.
Real guides and honest advice for adventures beyond your comfort zone
Collective Years On The Road
50+
Readers And Counting
50M+
Countries Covered
90+
Deep Backpacking Guides
120+
Newsletter Subscribers
30K
Our Manifesto
What We Do
There's no shortage of travel sites telling you how to find cheap flights, which hostels to check out in Bangkok or why Paris is a shithole (ok… some of us like Paris)! Sure, we cover those… but we go further and harder, into the often uncomfortable, messy, yet unforgettable side of travel.
The Broke Backpacker exists for people who want to push their comfort zone, whether that's Thailand on $20 a day, a summer Interrailing through Europe, or hitchhiking through Iran. We've covered all three, and everything in between, with the same approach: go there, tell the truth, and don't make it prettier than it is.
We're a team of people who travel hard and have opinions - some of which might disappoint you. Because travel ain’t always easy and there will be places you won’t like, routes which will wreck you, and hostels you should avoid at all costs. We’re here to tell you which.
No fluff. No filters. Just raw, real and honest travel advice direct from the road.
Our Story So Far
The Broke Backpacker is born!
Will Hatton launches The Broke Backpacker as a mailing list to forty friends back home. Nobody expected it to become much more than that.
From mailing list to website destination.
thebrokebackpacker.com is launched.
Published our first mega backpacking guide (India).
Setting the standard for the in-depth destination coverage TBB would become known for.
The team grows.
As coverage expands to Nepal, Myanmar, and beyond, TBB becomes more than one person's adventure.
The Broke Backpacker Manifesto was published.
It's our first formal statement of what we stand for and why travel matters.
Passed 1M readers in a month for the first time.
The mailing list of 40 had come a long way.
Covid brought global travel to a halt.
It took 80% of our traffic with it. We survived!
Editorial tone shifts.
From shock value to serving aspiring adventurers.
New leadership, renewed focus.
Jeff comes on board as Managing Editor, with founder Will remaining involved in the site he built.
Meet the Broke Backpackers
Here at the Broke Backpacker, we’re a bunch of misfit vagabonds who can never seem to sit still for five minutes. Whether we’re jumping on motorbikes in Vietnam, climbing glaciers in Pakistan, SCUBA diving in Thailand, vanlifing around Europe, getting lost in South America or being chased by snakes in Australia... we’ve always got a story to tell, and we love sharing our knowledge and experience with the world.
A Personal Note
From The Managing Editor
Will Hatton started The Broke Backpacker in 2011 as a mailing list of forty people getting dispatches from the road. It eventually grew into something bigger than one person’s travels and became one of the most-read adventure travel sites on the internet.
Over the years, the site expanded in scope and scale. That growth was real, but so was the occasional drift toward covering everything at the expense of covering things deeply. I came on board as Managing Editor in late 2025. Will is still involved, but we're sharpening our focus.
We’re now pushing depth over breadth: guides written by people who've been to the places they're writing about, honest recommendations that don't bend for affiliate revenue, and the kind of raw, opinionated travel writing that made this site worth reading in the first place. The Broke Backpacker has always been best when it was specific and a little uncomfortable. That's the version we're building back toward, and we're candid that it's a work in progress.
My background is corporate (please don’t judge), not travel writing, but I've had one foot in this world for a long time. In my 20s, I walked out of an investment banking job and spent 13 months crossing 20 countries on five continents. I wrote badly-formatted blog posts that my family actually read and my friends pretended to. Eventually, I went back to a corporate career, which lasted longer than I expected. But a long stretch on the Appalachian Trail and a persistent inability to stop planning the next trip made it clear that the desk wasn't the whole story.
If you're reading this, you're probably planning something. We're here to help you when things get messy, not just when they go to plan (those times create the best memories anyway).
Jeff Bell, Managing Editor
The Integrity Standard
This is what we hold ourselves to: no AI content, no desk research dressed up as first-hand experience, no recommendations that bend for affiliate revenue. We're working through a large archive to bring it up to the same bar and we're honest about that. Here's exactly how we work.
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What We’re Known For
Our most epic posts and the best takes from the road.
Where to next?
118 countries. 4,000+ guides. Real advice from people who've been.