For fifteen years, a small editorial operation in San Francisco has been arguing - in print, in pixels, and in podcasts - that travel ought to do something to you, not just for you.
A magazine in an era that supposedly killed magazines. A staff of curious adults in an era that supposedly killed curious adults.
Walk into Afar's San Francisco office on any given morning and you will find people arguing about cabs in Oaxaca. Not Uber surge pricing. Real cabs, with real drivers, who have real opinions about a road that used to be a footpath. The argument is editorial: does this trip belong in the magazine. The standard - unwritten, but pinned to the wall in spirit - is whether a local would recognize their place in the story. If yes, it runs. If not, it doesn't.
This is a small, specific way of working. It is also, if you squint, the entire business plan. Afar - the company is "Afar Media," but the brand has always insisted on the four-letter version - publishes a quarterly print magazine, a daily-updated website, podcasts, video, newsletters, and a slate of travel experiences. It does so for roughly a million monthly online readers and about 250,000 paying subscribers who still want the physical object on the coffee table. In 2026, that is not a soft accomplishment. It is the achievement.
Pictured (not pictured): the cab driver in Oaxaca, who would prefer a tip.
By 2008, much of the genre had quietly become a catalogue with weather descriptions. Greg Sullivan and Joe Diaz thought a reader might notice.
Travel writing, at its best, is among the oldest and most useful forms of journalism. At its worst - and the late aughts were close to that worst - it was a stack of branded gift bags with bylines. Hotels were sublime. Beaches were pristine. The food was always, somehow, a revelation. Travel media had a problem the audience could smell across the room.
Sullivan and Diaz, who had been entrepreneurs in everything from real estate to arcade games before any of this, were the audience. They were also frequent, slightly obsessive travelers. The two had taken a six-week trip to India in 2007 and noticed, on a beach in Goa with cold Kingfishers, that the trips they remembered were never the brochure trips. They were the wrong turn, the host's mother-in-law, the bus that broke down outside Hampi. The genre was selling the opposite.
Editorial meeting, 2008: two non-publishers decide to start a magazine. Unwise. Effective.
The bet was modest in language and immodest in scope: a travel publication that took journalism seriously, took readers seriously, and treated the places it covered as places, not products. It would carry a print magazine because print is where a certain kind of reader still lives. It would carry a website because a magazine without one is a hobby. And it would put its name on a quiet, specific word - "Afar" - that doubles as a description (a far place) and a tribute (an ethnic group in the Horn of Africa). Subtlety, in a category not known for it.
The same year Gourmet folded. The same year Vibe folded. The same year Domino folded. That year.
In August 2009, with the Great Recession still chewing through every glossy on the newsstand, Afar shipped its first issue. Industry observers had two reactions, in order: surprise, then concern. The concern was reasonable. The surprise turned out to be the point.
The founders brought in Julia Cosgrove as Editor-in-Chief and built the publication around contributor relationships - real writers, real photographers, sent to actual places for actual durations. Stories ran long. Photos were given room. The design borrowed from National Geographic's seriousness and Monocle's confidence without imitating either. The thesis - experiential, conscientious, well-reported travel - was not framed as a niche. It was framed as what the category was supposed to be, all along.
Sullivan, left, sketches a magazine on a napkin. Diaz, right, asks who is paying for it. They figure it out.
Afar is not really four products. It is one argument, told in four registers.
Quarterly, paid, beautifully produced. Twice named Best Travel Magazine in America. The format that earned the brand.
Daily-updated guides, news, planning tools and longform. Where most readers actually meet the brand.
A podcast that does what the magazine does, only with more pauses and the occasional siren.
Trips and live events that take the magazine off the page and put it in actual rooms in actual cities.
A small constellation - planners, news, deals, deep dives - for readers who would rather scroll less and arrive more.
Mapbox, Sailthru, Salesforce, Cloudflare, Mixpanel, Slack - a modern media stack that quietly holds the whole thing up.
Stack diagram redacted to protect the engineer who has to maintain it.
A timeline that is, like all good timelines, a polite lie about how messy it actually was.
Sullivan and Diaz take a six-week trip to India. The idea for Afar surfaces somewhere between Mumbai and Goa.
The print magazine launches in the worst possible year for print magazines. It does not fold.
An unusual round in an unusual category, in an unusual economy.
Afar starts collecting Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards - the genre's serious prize.
First Folio award. The category's incumbents take notice.
Afar.com becomes a daily publication; podcasts begin to take shape.
A second top honor confirms that issue one was not a fluke.
Circulation climbs past 200,000. A founder's note thanks readers for, essentially, listening.
The travel category vanishes overnight. Afar leans into journalism about whether and how to go.
A studio overhaul of the magazine modernizes the look without softening the editorial line.
The digital audience eclipses anything the founders had projected fifteen years earlier.
Mission codified in the corporate structure. The fine print finally matches the brand.
Numbers are not the point of Afar. They are, however, persuasive.
It is one thing to publish a travel magazine in 2009. It is another to still be publishing one - profitably, growing, in print - in 2026. Afar's audience has compounded across three formats without losing the editorial voice that earned the first one. Awards are nice; renewal rates are nicer. Both have been kind.
Approx. monthly engagement, late-2025 estimates
Bars are sized roughly; the editorial standard is sized exactly.
Afar's commercial business is a mix the way modern travel media has to be: print and digital advertising, sponsored editorial, custom publishing, and partnerships with tourism boards, hospitality brands and airlines. The trick - and the reason the church-state line still holds - is that the editorial team will not run anything that fails the locals-would-recognize-it test. Brands keep coming back anyway, which is the most honest review the model could get.
A sentence that should be insufferable, written by people who mean it.
Afar's stated mission is to inspire and enable rich, meaningful, experiential travel that benefits the traveler, the host community and the planet. In most companies that sentence is a wall decal. At Afar it is the assignment list. Coverage of sustainable tourism, responsible travel and local economies is not a vertical. It is the lens through which the rest of the coverage is filtered.
The mission is also why the public benefit company structure was the natural endpoint. A PBC is not a tax trick. It is a legal commitment to weigh mission alongside profit, and to report against both. For an editorial brand that has spent fifteen years saying tourism should leave a place better than it found it, the structure was less a reinvention than an admission.
A mission statement, in the wild. Slightly faded. Still legible.
Travel is about to be reshaped, again, by the same forces reshaping the rest of media: AI summarization, algorithmic destination hype, the slow homogenization of the world's most photographable places. The risk is obvious. The opportunity is obvious to almost no one. Afar's wager is that the more travel content there is, the more readers will pay - in money, attention, loyalty - for travel coverage that is reported, considered and useful. The bigger the firehose, the more valuable the editor.
If they are right, Afar's next decade looks less like a magazine that survived and more like a category being reset. If they are wrong, they still get to keep running an awarded magazine, a million-reader website, and a podcast that listeners actively look forward to. There are worse hedges in publishing.
The argument about the Oaxaca cab will go on for another forty minutes. Someone will pull up a photo. Someone else will note that the road, technically, is now paved. The piece will probably run. The cab driver, who does not read English-language travel magazines, will not know. The host community, who increasingly does, will. That is the test Afar set for itself fifteen years ago - and the only one, in the end, that has ever made the company hard to copy.
All the official outposts, plus a couple of detours worth taking.