About Reid Bramblett
Reid Bramblett learned Italian on a Roman playground when he was 12 years old, explored Europe for two years in a hippie-orange VW camper-van, and took a break from Cornell's anthropology department to spend his junior year abroad at Temple University's Rome campus.
After a stint in Frommer's editorial office, he decided to see what life was like on the other side of the desk, so he became a freelance writer, writing Frommer's first regional guidebook—Frommer's Tuscany & Umbria. He hasn't stopped exploring, learning, taking notes, and reporting it all in his guidebooks and articles since.
Reid has authored 10 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.
His weekly adventure column, "The Intrepid Traveler," 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, and he has written for the Miami Herald, Dallas Morning News, Modern Bride, and Newsweek. He has appeared as a travel expert on CNN, Fox NEWS, CNNfn, and the New York City affiliates of ABC, Fox, and UPN. He has consulted for national tourism boards, major tour companies, executives planning trips, and couples looking for something special on their next vacation.
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. It grew from a single page posted to his Web space (purely for his own benefit) full of the links he referred to constantly while researching and updating guidebooks. At bookstore talks, he got tired of slowly spelling out each of these useful addresses while attendees scribbled them down, and eventually just said, "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 little more than an attempt to help travelers make sense of the ever-burgeoning world of online travel information.