About Reid Bramblett

Reid Bramblett

ReidsGuides.com

is written, designed, and maintained by guidebook author and travel expert

Reid Bramblett.

Reid learned Italian on a Roman playground when he was 12 years old while his father, Frank—a painter and professor at Tyler School of Art—was teaching at the school's Temple University Rome campus. That's how Reid ended up spending his adolescence exploring Europe in a hippie-orange VW camper-van with his parents.

Reid later took a break from Cornell's anthropology department to spend his own junior year abroad in Italy.

The guidebook years

After a stint in the editorial offices of the Frommer's guidebooks, he decided to see what life was like on the other side of the desk. His first gig as a freelance writer: Frommer's first regional guide, Tuscany & Umbria. He spent the next decade exploring, learning, taking notes, and reporting it all in his guidebooks and articles.

Reid has authored ten guidebooks,

and collectively updated them over 22 editions—including Frommer's Italy from $90 A day, Europe for Dummies, DK's Eyewitness Top 10 Milan & The Lakes, and Frommer's Memorable Walks in New York—and has contributed to more than two dozen others, most recently to Pauline Frommer's Italy.

Beyond guidebooks

Reid's weekly adventure column, "The Intrepid Traveler,"

has appeared in the Chicago Daily Herald, St. Petersburg Times, and the Tampa Bay Times. He is a

Contributing Editor to Condè Nast's Concierge.com and to Budget Travel magazine,

where he formerly was Associate Editor.

As a

daily travel reporter for MSNBC.com

in 2003, Reid won

two Lowell Thomas awards

for travel writing, and he has written feature articles for the Miami Herald, Dallas Morning News, TravelandLeisure.com, Modern Bride, and Newsweek.

Reid has appeared as a travel expert on CNN, Fox NEWS, CNNfn, and the New York City affiliates of ABC, Fox, and UPN (click here to download a clip reel of some of these appearances).

Reid has also served as a travel consultant for national tourism boards, major tour companies, executives planning trips, and couples looking for something special on their next vacation.

The story of ReidsGuides.com

Reid Bramblett's

award-winning ReidsGuides.com trip-planning site (and its offspring sites NoFrillsAir.com and BeyondHotels.net) has been recommended by CNN, USA Today, Smart Money, The Washington Post, MSNBC.com, Frommers.com, Fodors.com, Men's Health, Away.com, and National Geographic Traveler, and has been proclaimed "Among the best" by Arthur Frommer.

However, Reid didn't start this site to promote himself and his writing. (Well, not just that anyway.) It grew from a single page posted to his personal Web space—purely for his own benefit—listing the links to which he referred constantly while researching and updating his guidebooks.

At bookstore talks to promote the guidebooks, Reid got tired of slowly spelling out each of these terribly useful travel urls while attendees scribbled them down, and eventually just started saying, "Actually, most of these links are on my Web site," and gave out the link.

Within a few days, he began getting e-mails complimenting the set of links, but complaining that it wasn't clear what some of them were without clicking over to the sites. So he began annotating them.

That was in 1997. The site that continues to grow and expand from that set of links is Reid's attempt to continue helping travelers make sense of the ever-burgeoning world of online travel information, plan more interesting trips, and learn to travel beyond vacations™.