Samantha Brown Is Celebrating 25 Years of Travel Hosting — Here's What She's Learned Over That Quarter Century

As the host and producer of the Emmy Award-winning PBS travel show Samantha Brown’s Places to Love, Brown has become a travel guide for millions. Her career’s purpose has been to discover the magic of a destination and reveal what makes it worth visiting. Whether exploring a well-known city through a fresh pair of eyes or exposing a hidden gem, Brown will seek out a place, experience it, and share its people, culture, and unique history with the world. 

After traveling over 2.5 million miles and visiting 65 countries, Brown is ready to celebrate her 25 years in the travel industry. The two-time Emmy winner sat down with Travel + Leisure to talk about her incredible journeys over the years, how it took her some time to catch the travel bug, and her exciting eighth season of Samantha Brown’s Places to Love, airing now. The series will feature a 25th Anniversary Special episode that starts rolling out nationwide on Jan. 17.

When she graduated from Syracuse University (from the musical theater department and not the revered journalism school), Brown’s original plans were to pursue an acting career on Broadway.  She moved to New York City after graduation and waited tables as she attempted this very tough path. “I always say that when you're in musical theater, you're considered a triple threat because you can sing, act, and dance. And when I moved to New York City, I realized I wasn't threatening at all,” she said with a laugh.

After some commercial and spokesperson gigs, her foray into travel began with a job hosting the Travel Channel's Great Vacation Homes in 1999. The reception was strong, and she went on to host many other shows, including Girl Meets Hawaii (2000), Great Hotels (2002), and Passport to Europe (2005), before eventually hosting and producing Samantha Brown’s Places to Love on PBS in 2018. The following year, the show won the Emmy for Outstanding Travel/Adventure Program and Brown won the Emmy for Outstanding Host. "I never dreamed this big, that this would be my life. I guess just the short answer is that it was never part of the plan. And it is something so grand in my life. I still cannot believe this has been my path and I've been able to enjoy it,“ she told T+L.

Despite having the dream job of many, Brown admits it took her a while actually to catch the travel bug. The most traveling she had done as a kid was in the family station wagon, driving from her home in New Hampshire to Pennsylvania to visit family during her summer vacation. Traveling the world for more than 220 days per year was a major life shift, and a challenging adjustment. There was a loneliness component to staying in hotels so often and not seeing friends and family regularly, as well as a feeling of general emptiness, even when seeing some of the greatest sites in the world.

Her perspective started to change, though, thanks to the power of personal connections with people in these extraordinary places. “What is that void that we don't see when we're just maybe reading an article about it, or seeing beautiful pictures of a destination? What else is behind that picture? That's what I focused on when the camera wasn't rolling," she explained. "And that's what fulfilled me as a human being to keep going and then fall in total love with travel. But at first, I didn't have the bug.”

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Over her two-decade career, Brown has observed significant changes in the travel industry and, of course, how she has covered it. When she started, the only thing she traveled with was a thesaurus to help her write. Even if she had a laptop, she couldn’t always access the internet in every place. Brown loves how travel has become democratized in recent years because of social media and the internet. “The world is now totally accessible,” she said. 

As for travel trends, Brown takes a more holistic view. She thinks everything is a trend simply because so many more people travel now. She does points out one thing that's not fleeting, though: the general state of unrest in the world, which requires travelers to be more deliberate when planning. This awareness also helps when they are selecting one of the places featured on the show. “We don’t go anywhere we can’t get to within two flights from the U.S.,” she told T+L of her and her crew's destination criteria. “We do that because of the weather, the unrest, and because so much can disrupt travel these days. You have to simplify. I just think ease of use might become this underlying travel trend. What's easy to get to? That I don't have to overthink, that I don't have to worry about it being 102 degrees. What's that destination? That's going to be a travel trend to watch.”

What hasn’t changed, according to Brown, is that strong desire to experience something authentic, and that means not just being a consumer. “When we understand people as a resource and their stories and their effort, that's what I consider sustainability, and how do we keep these small businesses going? You're less of a consumer that way. You're more part of the community. When you understand what went into creating that business that you now get to walk into and experience, that you get to just take part in, a lot goes on behind the scenes, and so it's to reveal what's behind the scenes. That is the hidden gem. It's not the business itself. It's the effort to create that business that, to me, is what's hidden and needs to come out.”

Her best advice for travelers to develop these connections is to create a ritual on a trip. “Instead of going to new places every day, I like to find the cafe that will be my spot, and that's how I begin the day," she said. "And that puts me in a more relaxed state. I'm there, and I become more aware of the ebb and flow of a place. That also makes me more comfortable to turn to somebody and say, ‘Hey, do you know where I should go for the best this?' Because that's a local. Just talk to people."

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She finds this tactic is also a great strategy for determining some of the “best places.” She explained, “We go to where everyone's going and then we just go one or two streets over. Find the parallel streets because where everyone's going is the touristy area, but the parallel streets and the side streets are where the locals have their businesses. We go to exactly where everyone's going and then we just start exploring the side streets to find those little businesses, those little hidden gems, because that's exactly where they are.”

As for the Places to Love that made the cut for 2025, the list includes New Orleans, Berlin, Leipzig, Traverse City, Michigan, and Route 66, among others (you can check out the full list of episodes). Brown points out that, although New Orleans is a major tourist destination, her show wants to direct visitors to a different area. She explored neighborhoods outside the French Quarter and found a resurrected jazz club where Little Richard got his start and Tina Turner was a performer.

This is also why the show chose the lesser-known Leipzig, Germany, in addition to Berlin. She said part of their strategy is to answer the over-tourism challenge, but also to show people something they may have missed otherwise. In her travels in Leipzig, she and the show's crew discovered it was the citizens of this smaller city who played a pivotal role in bringing down the Berlin Wall.

Brown loves finding hidden gems abroad, but she also immensely enjoys highlighting great domestic trips. She loved doing the entirety of Route 66 for season 8, for example. Her team has now done episodes on the iconic road, starting in Illinois through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. Then, in 2026, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Route 66, they will conclude with New Mexico, Arizona, and California. “Road trips like this allow us to get into those mid-states that travel must showcase more. We are a very coast-driven country. The Midwest gets forgotten.”

In her long career, she miraculously hasn’t had too many travel mishaps — except for landing in Switzerland with her entire crew of eight people only to have their 22 cases of luggage and equipment delayed by bad weather. With that situation, she learned the essential lesson of always having a toothbrush and clean underwear with you even if you are checking bags. 

In addition to the toothbrush hack and using her HSN luggage line she debuted in 2011, her biggest piece of travel advice is refreshingly simple: Get yourself familiar with the gate you arrive at, especially when traveling internationally. Chances are, you'll be around the same area when you depart. And when it comes to the age-old question of when to arrive at the airport, Brown said, “There's no such thing as getting to the airport too early.” There you have it. 

As she reflects on her 25-year career, her mission with Samantha Brown’s Places to Love and her coverage of travel in general is clear: Show a unique view. “A city or a place isn’t just one thing. We challenge ourselves to show a greater racial diversity and economic makeup, and we want to make sure this story gets told by the right people," she said. And even though she has seen a lot of the world, Brown said there are still parts of Africa as well as magical-sounding places like Darjeeling, India that remain on her travel wish list, so luckily we can expect to continue seeing a lot more of her.

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