About Travon

Travon began the way a lot of good trips begin: with a spreadsheet that got out of hand. It started as a shared file for planning one road trip from New Orleans, with a column for gas, a column for motels, a column for food, and one more column that turned out to matter more than the rest. It was called “Was it worth it?”

That column is still the reason this site exists. Travon is an independent travel publication from Travon Inc., based in New Orleans, Louisiana. We write practical, honest guides to traveling in the United States: national parks, classic road trips, city weekends, regional food and the places you sleep along the way. Every guide is built to answer the questions you actually have before you book, not the ones that make for pretty captions.

What we publish

Our guides fall into five sections, each with its own color on the site:

• National Parks: when to visit, how reservations and permits work, which trails fit your fitness level, and where to stay inside and outside the gates.
• Road Trips: routes planned end to end, with realistic mileage, daily driving times, overnight stops and honest cost estimates.
• City Breaks: weekend itineraries organized by neighborhood, so you spend your time exploring instead of crossing town.
• Food & Stays: regional dishes worth traveling for, how to choose a hotel or cabin, and when a splurge is actually worth it.
• Travel Guides: the practical side of travel, including flights, insurance, packing, safety and budgeting.

Who is behind Travon

Travon is led by Eric Gamble, founder of Travon Inc. and editor-in-chief of the site. Eric sets the editorial direction, decides which guides we publish and update, and signs off on every story before it goes live. He works from New Orleans, which is also why you will find a little more Louisiana on these pages than on most national travel sites.

We are a small team on purpose. A small team means the person who researched a guide is the same person who answers your email about it, and the same person who updates it when a park changes its reservation system or a road closes for the season.

How we work

We hold ourselves to a few rules that do not bend:

• No sponsored reviews. Hotels, tour companies and tourism boards cannot pay to be featured or to change what we write.
• Real costs. When we give prices, we tell you when they were checked, and we round honestly instead of quoting the lowest fare anyone has ever seen.
• Primary sources first. Park rules, permit systems and road conditions change. We check official sources such as the National Park Service, state transportation departments and operators directly, and we link to them so you can confirm details yourself.
• Updates, not just new posts. Our most-read guides are reviewed on a regular schedule, and every guide shows the date it was last updated.
• Corrections in the open. If we get something wrong, we fix it and say so. You can read exactly how in our Editorial Policy.

How Travon is funded

Travon is free to read. We pay for research, hosting and the time it takes to keep guides current through display advertising and, on some pages, affiliate links. If you book something through one of those links we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Commissions never decide what we recommend, and we tell you plainly where these links appear. Our Affiliate Disclosure explains it in full.

Talk to us

We genuinely want to hear from you, especially if you have just come back from a trip and something in a guide was out of date. Corrections, story ideas, questions and partnership requests all go to the same place.

Thanks for reading, and safe travels. Take the long way when you can.