About Steve Strong

Writer at Destination Decider

• Dual Pilgrim
• 30+ Years Traveling
• Lived Overseas
• Four Continents
• Fluent in Spanish

I’m Steve Strong, the writer behind most of the travel planning articles on Destination Decider. I’m not a full-time travel influencer or a former travel agent — just someone who got tired of relearning the same pre-trip lessons the hard way, trip after trip, until I started writing down what actually worked. That system eventually became this site.

Destination Decider grew out of a simple frustration: most travel content online is either a generic list or an overwhelming wall of information with no real order to it. After planning enough trips, I realized that travel often starts with a quiet sense of uncertainty — and that feeling sticks around the whole trip if you’re not prepared for it. This site exists to replace that uncertainty with a plan: research and information before you go, a reference to lean on while you’re there, and a quick review afterward so the next trip is better than the last.

My travel background is more varied than most. Over 30+ years of traveling and living overseas, I’ve traveled regularly and extensively through North, Central, and South America, much of it in Spanish — I’m fluent in both Spanish and English, which changes what you can ask, who you can ask, and how much of a place you actually get to see. Living in a place rather than passing through it changes what you notice: you end up planning around ordinary life there, not just around the highlights. That experience taught me to plan for uncertainty before it becomes a problem. I’ve traveled solo, with family, and as a coordinator for group trips — across four continents and more than a dozen countries. Recently I became a Dual Pilgrim by completing both Spain’s Camino de Santiago and Japan’s Kumano Kodo on foot. These were two of the more logistically demanding trips I’ve taken and two that confirmed everything I believe about preparation mattering more than inspiration.

These days, most of my time goes into testing the tools and services recommended on this site before they go into an article, updating the Trip Planner as I learn what travelers actually need, and rewriting older articles as things change. Some links on this site are affiliate links — free for you to use, and they may earn a small commission that helps keep this site running. Full details are in our Affiliate Disclosure.

How I Research and Write These Guides

• Anything official goes to an official source. Entry requirements, visas, passports, health guidance and passenger rights are linked to the government or regulator that actually sets them — the State Department, CBP, the CDC, the DOT, the relevant national authority — not to another blog restating them.
• If a number cannot be verified, it does not get published. Prices, percentages and “studies show” claims either carry a real source or come out. Where a figure moves with the season or the market, the article says so and points you at the current one rather than freezing a number that will quietly go stale.
• First-hand experience is labeled as first-hand. When an article draws on a trip I actually took, it says so and gives you the specifics. When it does not, it sticks to what can be checked. I do not invent example travelers or borrowed anecdotes.
• Recommendations come before commissions. Some links here are affiliate links, disclosed on every article that carries one. They do not change what gets recommended, and nothing is recommended purely because it pays.
• Published is not finished. Older articles get revisited as rules and prices change, and corrections get made rather than quietly buried.

I’d rather publish fewer, more useful articles than chase every trending destination. If something on this site is out of date, unclear, or just wrong, let me know and I’ll fix it.