Beth Reiber

Growing up in Kansas, Beth Reiber couldn't wait to get out of Dodge. She got the travel bug at 16, after being chosen as one of a dozen U.S. Girl Scouts to spend one month in Sweden, where, to her delight, she learned scouting was co-ed. After earning a bachelor's degree in German and a master's in journalism from the University of Kansas, she worked for a small-town Kansas newspaper and later edited a travel magazine based in Tokyo.

But most of her adult life she's been a freelance travel writer, first selling articles to newspapers across the country from the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times and then moving on to magazines like National Geographic Traveler and USA Today. She's written nine guidebooks, including Frommer's guides to Japan for more than 35 years. Now she writes mostly for websites, including CNN.com, BBC.com and East-West News Service, but most of her work is for her own website, TravelReiber, which won honorable mention for blogging from SATW in 2024 and NATJA in 2025. Many of her blogs are picked up for syndication on aol.com and msn.com.

After living seven years in Germany and Japan, she decided Kansas wasn't so bad after all and returned to her hometown of Lawrence. She's never counted all the countries she's been to but reckons it must be nearing 60. Although she considers Japan her specialty, she writes about everywhere she goes. People always ask what her favorite destination is, to which she always replies, “The place I haven’t been to yet.”