Christopher Elliott is a travel consumer advocate, multimedia journalist and customer service expert. He’s the author of Scammed, a manifesto for empowering consumers and encouraging corporate responsibility, and How to Be the World’s Smartest Traveler, a definitive manual for having a better trip. Elliott is National Geographic Traveler‘s reader advocate, and writes a weekly column for The Washington Post and USA Today.

Alden Jones is the author of The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler’s Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia. She has lived, worked, and traveled in over forty countries, including as a WorldTeach volunteer in Costa Rica, a program director in Cuba, and a professor on Semester at Sea. She teaches creative writing and cultural studies at Emerson College in Boston.

Aaron Smith is an Australian freelance journalist and author of Shanti Bloody Shanti: An Indian Odyssey, a travel memoir published in Australia, New Zealand, UK and USA. He is a regular contributor to Australian Geographic Magazine and often talks on Australian radio. Aaron has a MA in Journalism from the University of Tasmania and lives in Hobart (sometimes).

Dan Saltzstein has worked at the New York Times since 1999. He is currently an editor in the Travel section. His writing and photography has appeared in the Travel, Dining, Arts, Books, and Metropolitan sections. He graduated from Amherst College and lives in Woodside, Queens, with his wife and daughter.

Pegi Vail is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. Her documentary Gringo Trails features the stories of travelers and locals, alongside footage from Bolivia, Thailand, Mali, and Bhutan, to explore both positive and negative impact of tourism on these places over the last 30 years. Right of Passage, a book based her anthropology research among travelers and their stories in Bolivia as a Fulbright Scholar, is forthcoming (Duke University Press).

Edward Readicker-Henderson is a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler and ISLANDS. Writing stories so autobiographical a bio note becomes utterly redundant, he’s won three Lowell Thomas awards, has interviewed kings and shamen, but has never once noodled for flatheads.

Suzanne Roberts is the author of the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award) as well as four collections of poetry, including Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel. She currently teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College, and for the low residency MFA program in creative writing at Sierra Nevada College.

Michael Meyer is the author of The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, which details the three years he spent in the Chinese capital’s oldest neighborhood. He first came to China in 1995 as a Peace Corps volunteer, then worked as a Beijing-based journalist, contributing to The New York Times, TIME, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post and many more outlets.

Torre DeRoche is the author of Love with a Chance of Drowning, a travel memoir that recounts her two year sailing voyage across the Pacific Ocean with her new lover and her morbid fear of deep water. When she’s not at home in Melbourne, Australia, DeRoche is at large in the world, making art, pursing adventures, and blogging at fearfuladventurer.com.

Matthew Power is a contributing editor at Harper’s and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and his work has also appeared in GQ, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Wired, The New York Times, Slate, The Atavist, Granta and elsewhere. He has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing three times (2007, 2008, 2010), and has won two Lowell Thomas Awards. He lives in Brooklyn.

Jodi Ettenberg is the author of The Food Traveler’s Handbook. She is also the founder of Legal Nomads, which chronicles worldwide travel and food adventures, and is a contributing editor for Longreads. Prior to founding Legal Nomads, Jodi worked for five years as a corporate lawyer in New York City. She frequently speaks about social media strategy, food and travel, and curation.