Since 2018, Where Are Those Morgans has been a leading resource for expert travel, hiking and photography guides. This page explains the established process we always follow to provide trustworthy, accessible and accurate information.
We’d like to draw your attention to our editorial process because it’s the foundation for our entire business. We want to show you why you can trust us with your travel plans. All of the content you’ll find on our site is based on the 5 pillars below.
Firsthand Travel Experience
Information is incredibly easy to access in today’s online world. But very few sources of information are derived from firsthand experiences.
A significant amount of websites only offer regurgitated versions of what someone else has already written – and while AI tools are great for some things, they still hallucinate and can also only regurgitate versions of what others have published online.
That’s what makes us different. We only provide the highest quality content that’s trustworthy, evidence-based, accurate, understandable and actionable – based on the fact we have personally visited every single destination that you can read about across Where Are Those Morgans.
Since 2018, we’ve spent days, weeks or months of our time, energy and money exploring travel destinations around the world in order to provide you with the most comprehensive expert information possible. Every guide is written directly from our own firsthand accounts, because we’ve lived the experiences ourselves.
We have travel FOMO. So when we visit a new place, we do every attraction, every photo spot and every neighborhood. That’s our travel style and our primary audience is other travelers who hate to miss out when they visit new places.
We also take tours, eat at restaurants and stay in hotels. When we recommend things in our guides, it’s because we’ve done them or we would do them ourselves. We do not camp, then recommend hotels. We do not skip an attraction, then try to sell a tour. That’s not our style.
Our goal is to always provide completely original and detailed travel guides to help serious planners prepare better for upcoming trips.
Written By Us
In addition to personally visiting every place we write about, every single travel guide and expert guidebook you read on Where Are Those Morgans has been exclusively and independently written by us, Mark and Kristen Morgan.
We’ve never had any other author or ghostwriter contribute to our site. We want our readers to know they can trust that every guide has been experienced and written by us.
We do not allow guest posts and we do not outsource any writing or content creation of any type. While we agree AI automation can be helpful in certain scenarios or industries, we do not use AI for any of our content production, writing or photos across our business. Every guide is 100% human-made.
Since we personally travel to every destination, hike every trail and photograph every landscape, we consider ourselves to be subject matter experts in everything we write about.
It’s very easy for us to create our travel guides from scratch with no additional tools because we can draw from our experiences, rather than have an AI tool create a template based on other people’s work.
These processes ensure high journalistic standards for all of our content, showcasing our individual perspectives written for people by people. As a team of two, we both influence every piece of content as it’s published and updated. to ensure accuracy and quality.
The biggest hurdle we face is time, with just two writers creating content from the ground up with no automation. But we’re determined to continue publishing original content directly from our own experiences to provide the most comprehensive and trustworthy information possible.
Our Methodical Approach
Before traveling the world for 7 years and becoming genuine travel experts, we had careers as analytical scientists. The hard skills we learned in our various laboratory leadership roles translate into our strategic and methodical approach to creating comprehensive travel content.
This scientific background is what makes our serious travel planning brand unique. You can read more about us here.
Here’s our proven methodical and scientific approach to creating helpful and original travel guides:
- Extensive research and planning before visiting any destination
- Assessing what visitors want to do and see in a new place
- Creating our own version of a “bucket list”
- Spending long days, weeks or months traveling, hiking and photographing the destination
- Finish by spending many hours writing travel guides directly from our experiences
Each travel guide we publish takes between one to three full days to complete, and each premium guidebook we create takes around 1 week to publish. For both, timelines typically depend on the topic, destination and depth.
Just like a scientific research paper, we only reference credible sources like governments sites, academic institutions and reputable websites that offer genuine value to our readers.
We also perform regular audits to continually monitor and update our content, ensuring we’re sharing the most up-to-date and accurate information. You’ll see two dates on our travel guides:
- First published date – The date our guide was originally written and published.
- Last updated date – The last time we updated a guide which could include corrections, new information, replacement of images or changes to outdated sections such as open times, cost, etc.
Links in our articles are not for sale. We do not place any links as favors and we do not participate in any link-building schemes behind the scenes.
We Take Our Own Photos
We’re professional travel photographers and almost every single photo across our site has been taken by us in person. We do not use stock photos or AI generated photos on our site, our social media channels or our store.
We have two cameras and two lenses, two tripods, filters and two camera backpacks. For post-editing, we use Lightroom to gently edit our RAW photos, but we never use Photoshop.
One of our biggest pet peeves when we travel is being excited to see a landscape because we saw a photo that looked stunning, only to arrive and realize the photo wasn’t real. With the photos on our site – what you see is what you’ll get when you arrive.
Using our own photos from all corners of the world further demonstrates our expertise and build trust in the travel, hiking and photography space.
Our photos have been published in various media outlets, which you can see in our press portfolio. As an example, we had 29 photos published in Gestalten’s Great American Roadtrip in 2022, including several two page spreads and cover photos.
Travel photography has become one of our biggest passions in life. Waking up early to photograph a stunning sunrise over a spectacular landscape is when we are happiest. You can shop our favorite travel photos in our professional photography gallery.
Paying For Travel
We almost always pay for our own flights, hotels and attractions when we visit new places before writing our guides.
In very rare and selective instances, we will partner with a travel company if we believe the partnership can improve our readers’ experiences.
But we only agree to partner if the product or service is something we would use ourselves, and the partnership has no bearing on how we write our guide. You can rest assured every guide we publish is honest, bias-free and from our own genuine opinion.
In order to maintain this high standard, we also re-evaluate brands on a yearly basis to ensure those brands still align with our brand.
An Editorial Process Created For You
Our readers are always our first priority, and we strive to be the go to resource for anything travel, hiking and photography related.
We want to share our transparent editorial process with you because it’s essential you know that our mission is to provide you with the most trustworthy, accessible and accurate information possible.
But it’s also important to know that travel experiences – including ours – are subjective. Our opinions, budget, timeframes and general travel style might not be exactly the same as yours. We strive to be as inclusive as possible when publishing our guides, but certain travelers goals will not align with ours.
We can honestly say we have the best job in the world and we genuinely look forward to waking up every morning so we can help you find new and exciting places to visit.
At Where Are Those Morgans, we’re always working hard to improve. If you have any questions or comments about this policy or anything else, please feel free to contact us.
If you have any questions about our policies, you can visit our disclosure, privacy policy or terms of use.