World Travel Watch

World Travel Watch gives the latest scoop on international trouble spots and updates on improved travel conditions. It goes beyond traditional State Department announcements to add context and depth, and since 1985 has been helping travelers stay safe in an always wonderful but sometimes dangerous world.

At WorldTravelWatch.com travelers are able to search by region, country, or report type to help prepare for their trip. World Travel Watch is available for licensing, column subscription, and personal safety reports.

About World Travel Watch

World Travel Watch originated in 1985 when Larry Habegger and James O’Reilly were dissatisfied with coverage of world news in newspaper travel sections. It was a time when travel editors shied away from stories covering places perceived to be dangerous but also when aircraft hijackings were a common terrorist technique, and the need for balanced, accurate information about the world was more important than ever. They started writing their column with the intention of dispelling myths where they found them so entire countries wouldn’t get scratched off the travel map when security problems might be isolated to specific regions, and also to highlight those places that were truly dangerous and needed to be avoided. They felt that the State Department’s travel advisories were good to a point, but often too cautious and not specific enough. They wanted to go beyond those advisories and give readers deeper, broader, more useful information to make informed judgments about their travels.

Since 1985, World Travel Watch has appeared in some of the best newspapers in the U.S. and abroad, where readers in five countries have relied on the column for information about safe travel throughout the world. In that time, the column has appeared regularly in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, Indianapolis Star, Hartford Courant, St. Petersburg Times, and other U.S. newspapers, and in newspapers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. World Travel Watch appeared with the original launching of the Travelers’ Center on Global Network Navigator (GNN) at O’Reilly & Associates in 1993, and continuously on GNN while it was part of AOL.

Larry Habegger and James O’Reilly have been writing about adventure travel for magazines and newspapers both in the U.S. and abroad since 1980. They have visited six of the seven continents, traveling from the frozen Arctic to equatorial rain forest, the high Himalayas to the Dead Sea. They are the founding editors of the Travelers’ Tales book series and have worked on more than 100 titles, winning numerous awards for excellence. They are frequent radio guests, panelists, and speakers on the subjects of travel, travel writing, and travel security. They both live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Contact Larry: larry@LarryHabegger.com