About Us: Who We Are and How We Test

Rebeca Fenney is a journal for travel and hotels. Honest guides for the curious traveller, written by people who book and pay, not salesmen.

Who we are

We are a small crew of writers and frequent travellers who got tired of sales brochures pretending to be advice. Rebeca Fenney started in 2020 as a shared notebook of hotel stays and city walks, passed between friends who kept asking the same question: where should I stay, really?

Today the journal reaches thousands of monthly readers planning trips across Europe, Asia and the Americas. We are independent, we take no sponsored placements, and we keep the whole archive free to read.

Our mission

Our mission is simple: give travellers the information a good friend would give them. Every week we publish free guides across five sections: Luxury Stay, Travel Guide, Hotel Review, Destination Insight and Travel Experience. Real 2026 prices, tested rooms, transit notes and packing advice you can act on before you book.

We would rather tell you a hotel is overpriced than pad a list to fill it. If five stays are worth your money, we name five, not fifteen.

Editorial standards

No sponsored picks and no pay-to-rank lists. We buy at retail what we test, disclose any relationship, and correct mistakes in public within 48 hours. Numbers come from our own bookings, transit operators and official tourism boards, never from press releases. If a product fails in real use, we say so.

When we recommend a destination or a stay, we tell you the trade-off. A lake that is only swimmable at low tide, a hotel with thin walls, a rail pass that only pays off on long trips. The caveat is part of the guide.

The team

• Rebeca Fenney, editor and lead writer, twelve years of independent travel.
• Mara Ellis, hotels and luxury stays, a decade of reviewing rooms.
• Tomas Reid, transport and practical reporting, a former tour leader.
• Ines Duarte, cities and coastlines, based between two continents.
• Jonah Mercer, rail and long-form reporting, a former station manager.

Supported by contributing testers who review every guide before it ships. If a claim does not hold up on the ground, it does not go out under our name.

Talk to us

Corrections, pitches or a hotel we should test? Email us at [email protected], or use the contact page. We reply within one business day, and we read every message, even when we cannot feature every one.

If you are planning a trip, start with the Luxury Stay section or our most recent guide to Maldives overwater villas.

Where we cite standards or safety advice, we point readers to public bodies such as UN Tourism and national tourism boards, alongside our own reporting.