Editorial
Why Trust Us
The internet is full of travel writing produced by people who got a free stay in exchange for a glowing review. We think that's a conflict of interest. Here's how we work.
Editorial Standards
Every trip you read about on Dream Book & Travel was paid for by us. We book our own flights, pay for our own hotels, and eat at our own expense. Nobody comps us anything in exchange for coverage.
When we recommend a place, it's because we've been there. When we say something is overrated, we've been there too and formed that opinion ourselves.
We update articles when things change. An "updated" date at the top of an article means we've verified the information is still accurate — it's not a timestamp on a minor copy edit.
Affiliate Disclosure
Some links in our articles are affiliate links. This means 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 something because it has an affiliate program. We recommend it because it's genuinely good, and if there's an affiliate link available we'll use it — but the recommendation comes first.
If there's no affiliate link available for something we recommend, we link to it anyway. The editorial judgment is always independent of the commercial relationship.
Who We Are
Dream Book & Travel is run by Marcus Delaney, a former travel editor based in Portland, Oregon. Marcus spent six years writing affiliate-driven travel content for a mid-size media company before leaving in 2019. He started this site in 2022 with one rule: every trip is paid for, and every verdict is earned.
Before that, he worked in regional print journalism covering the Midwest, edited a campus paper at Ohio State, and spent a decade accumulating enough Spanish to navigate Latin America without a phrasebook. His editorial eye was sharpened by his mother, a high school English teacher who corrected his writing from age seven and treated vague sentences as a form of dishonesty.
Articles are edited with input from Elena, a landscape architect who reads every piece before it goes live and asks "did you actually say anything there" when a sentence is decorating rather than informing.
We don't cover everywhere. We cover places we've been, in a depth that makes the article worth reading.