What is Club Yolo?!
Where we started
YOLO Journal launched in the summer of 2019 as a visually immersive travel-lifestyle magazine in print, then joined Substack in 2021 with a weekly newsletter, Yolo Intel, sharing a trusted perspective on travel by gathering the very best suggestions from us and our well-traveled, discerning network. As our digital content on Substack grew, however, we felt we needed a platform that was more visually transportive, as travel arguably should be, and also more easily searchable. So in the summer of 2024, we launched our website, YoloJournal.com, to house our travel content archives—including our Black Book city guides, Travel Planners, hotel reviews, packing stories and more.
Our evolution
Right away we recognized that our website, though beautiful and easy to navigate, lacked a hub for our community to gather in the way that Substack does. And so, because we really missed hearing from you, understanding your travel pain points and joys, we’ve decided to come back. It won’t be the same as it was before—our weekly travel stories will continue to publish on our website. But we’ll use each platform for what it’s best at—Yolo Journal as our archive, and Substack for community. We’ll introduce you to our friends we admire (and think you will too), put up our monthly Moodboard, and get much more personal.
What’s the difference between our Substack and our website?
Think of our site, Yolojournal.com, as the library, and our Substack, Club Yolo, as the café just next to it. Our Yolo Intel digital newsletter, in which we share our latest travel stories (Black Book city guides, Travel Planners, hotel reviews, and Dispatches from near and far), comes out on Saturdays. Our Substack will land in your inbox midweek.
Club Yolo is the place to ask questions and get answers—from us and from your fellow readers. We’ll be in the Chat vertical, where we’ll collect your questions and then publish “You Asked for It” posts with our answers. Over here, we’ll also be sharing what’s on our minds and our radars. That includes travel inspiration like hotel design and destination style stories, Q&As with some of our expert contributors, packing videos, moodboards, playlists, and (eventually) podcasts. It’s also where we get much more personal, digging into the realities of life on the road, new discoveries and pain points.
What’s the difference between a paid Club Yolo subscription and a free one?
Paid subscribers can access all of our content here on Substack. That includes our most heavily researched stories, like how to travel to Europe with your pet, design inspiration from hotels around the world—anything that is a deep dive and takes a lot of hours to produce. It also means you can initiate Chat threads and pose questions to us and your fellow travelers; we’ll answer some of these in our monthly You Asked For It column.
Free sign-ups also make us happy—we’re aiming to share free posts twice a month! But you will have to upgrade in order to ask us for specific advice.
What if I already pay for a subscription on your YoloJournal.com?
We are grateful for our loyal paid subscribers on YoloJournal.com! We will keep that going with our weekly travel posts shared via our Yolo Intel newsletter. When we made the decision to launch a paywall here, we deliberately did not raise the prices for a subscription to our website. We’ve hired more people since we launched four years ago, and have never raised our subscription price. We hope you see value in both.
Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy what we do in both places! —Yolanda
P.S. In case you started following us here after we moved to our new site and you have no idea what we’re talking about, you can read more about us, and subscribe, here.
