Editorial
Why Trust Us
Most travel planning content is either a listicle or a personal story. Neither helps you decide which tools to use or what to cut. The Travel Studio covers the planning layer, and every comparison names where each option fails. Here is how we work.
Editorial Standards
Every comparison takes a position. We tell you which tool wins for which job and why, then we name the failure mode. A comparison with no honest limitation is a sponsored roundup wearing a disguise, and we do not publish those.
We exercise the tools on real planning tasks before we write about them. When an assessment is based on documented behavior and user reports rather than firsthand use, we say so in the post instead of pretending to a test run.
We update a comparison the day a tool ships a change that alters the verdict. A stale recommendation sends someone down the wrong workflow, and an "updated" date means we verified the verdict still holds, not that we fixed a typo.
Affiliate Disclosure
Some links in our articles are affiliate links. If you click through and book or buy something, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
We disclose these relationships on every article they appear in. We never recommend a tool because it pays the best affiliate rate. The verdict comes first, and if an affiliate link is available we use it, but the recommendation is independent of the commercial relationship.
When there is no affiliate link for something we recommend, we link to it anyway. The judgment is always separate from the money.
Who I Am
The Travel Studio is written by Maren Holloway. For sixteen years I was a commercial interior designer in Minneapolis. At forty I left the career and a marriage in the same year, and a year later I took my first solo trip, to Portugal, sure I had made a mistake. I had not.
I started this site because the honest guide I needed did not exist. There is plenty of travel inspiration and no shortage of listicles, but very little written by a woman who actually went alone, later than she planned, and can tell you what the first night really feels like and what to do about it.
I write in the first person because I am not reporting from a distance. Every safety note is dated and grounded in a real source, every recommendation is one I would give a friend, and I will tell you plainly when a place or a plan is not worth it.
I cover solo travel for women, in the depth that makes it useful: where to go, how to stay safe, what the solo part actually feels like, and how to plan it on one income.