About
Our world is incredible. There are so many amazing experiences out there. But do you find it time-consuming and difficult to find them?
Hi, I’m Matt Roach, the founder of Bucket List Travels.
I’m a passionate traveller – I’ve been fortunate to visit over 80 countries and had many incredible bucket list travel experiences. I plan to do many more.. at least when the kids grow up.
I launched Bucket List Travels in 2002 because I found researching bucket list trips to be a time-consuming and frustrating process.
There’s so much information out there to wade through, poor quality recommendations mixed in with the good, and it’s hard to know who to trust in an era of bots and fake reviews.
I just wanted those in the know to tell me where to go and what to do, to plan my holidays around, or to add to my travel bucket list. So I started hiring expert travel writers from around the world….
I hope you like the site and find it useful, but most of all I hope it gets you travelling – and ticking some of those extraordinary experiences off your list.
Our goals
We hope that getting people to ‘bucket list’ travel, and experience the incredible wonders of the world, will:
- Make us all fight harder to protect the earth, and save it for our children
- Provide income to local people in poorer countries, incentivising them to protect Earth’s treasures
- Make us all more understanding and tolerant of others, and appreciate what we have.
Our difference
Here are 8 stand-out features of Bucket List Travels that we think you’ll love:
- Only the best travel experiences, curated and distilled by experts – no fakes, no bias
- Newspaper-grade writing by top journalists, plus over 25,000 stunning images
- An advanced search to quickly discover great bucket list travel experiences
- Filters to refine your search results down to your specific needs
- Save favourites to a ‘travel bucket list’
- Ready-made itineraries to quick start your trip planning
- Recommendations of who best to book with
- Round-ups of the ‘best of the best’ for ultimate travel inspiration
There are a million travel sites out there, but no other travel site (that I know of) offers all of these features in one, which together makes bucket list travel research so much easier and more enjoyable.
What we don’t do
The site doesn’t take bookings – we only recommend who to book with. We also don’t recommend flights or car hire – that’s just logistics, you don’t need an expert travel writer’s opinion.
We also don’t recommend restaurants – unless there is some unique experience involved. They change so quickly, we think you’re better off asking your hotel or a specialist site like a local foodie blog.
Coverage
At launch in 2002, the site recommended over 1,200 bucket list travel experiences, 500 great places to stay and 90 destination guides.
The recommendations are mostly in the UK and Europe for now, but more content is being added each week, and over time, we hope to offer the same depth of coverage across the world.
Our writers
Our writers must specialise in the destinations or experiences they write about, and must write or have regularly written in the past, for the world’s top publications like Condé Nast Traveller, The Telegraph, The Times, Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, and so on. Many of our writers have written the guidebook.
See a list of our writers and their impressive expertise here.