The Duo Behind Two Bad Tourists
By David Brown & Auston Matta ( AKA Two Bad Tourists )
There’s no “right” way to travel. No more than there’s a right way to be gay, to work, to write or to live. Two Bad Tourists started as a gay travel blog operating with that premise: complete liberty to see the world in the way we wanted to.
The old travel cliché of “straying off the beaten path” tends to go out the window on arriving at a new destination, as the pressure mounts to see all the main tourist attractions and do all the “important” things. You can’t go to Paris and not see the Eiffel Tower, they’ll tell you. You can’t go to Cairo and not visit the Pyramids of Giza. Except you can and – in a lot of cases – we did. Two Bad Tourists is about going your own way and being a “bad” tourist – at least by other people’s standards.
Want to have a wild night out in Berlin and not see the city by daylight? Do it! Want to watch the world go by in a quiet LGBTQ+ friendly café on a tucked away road in Vienna, rather than pay a small fortune to enter yet another palace? Why not? Our blog and city guides help travelers find a little bit of everything including the best gay clubs, restaurants, events, and LGBTQ+ tours in addition to the more typical sightseeing, wherever you are in the world.
Starting as a personal travel blog, Two Bad Tourists later morphed into a website containing LGBTQ+ travel articles and city guides for most of the gay-friendly cities in the world. Years later it expanded further into guided tours, gay sailing trips, and gay group trips. Not to mention our podcast, Queer Travel Chat, where you can hear our experiences from our own mouths and listen to guests speak from within the LGBTQ+ travel industry as they share a glass of wine with us.
Luck is always a factor in building a business. At times we feel like the luckiest guys in the world. But, we also realize that success is hard work and a lot of trial and error. Let us share our story with you of how Two Bad Tourists came to be.
Of Wonder and Lust
Our story started back in 2005 in sunny Arizona while both of us were attending Arizona State University in Tempe. David studied Clinical Laboratory Sciences and Auston Bioengineering – worlds apart from anything to do with travel. In fact, if anyone had told us what was to come, we’d never have believed them.
We met after joining the gay fraternity on campus and clicked instantly. From there, our relationship progressed and we quickly became a couple. Auston graduated first and started working in Phoenix, but then received a job transfer to Chicago. In order to stay together, David transferred universities and thus we moved to the infamously windy city – which felt like moving from a scorching desert to a tundra during the winter. Upon graduation, David began work as a microbiologist in a lab in the city. In 2010, we sealed the deal and got married. We were still living in Chicago, but we celebrated with our loved ones in Sedona, Arizona. Same-sex marriage might not have been recognized back then, but we had a ceremony and considered ourselves husbands.
Despite our love of Chicago, it never really felt like home to us. So, we hatched a plan to move to San Diego, California in order to be closer to our families in Phoenix. Since that meant we’d have to quit our jobs and start over in a new city, we decided to take advantage of the situation by taking a year off. Afterall, what would it matter if we moved there immediately or in a year? Eventually, we arrived at the idea to travel before settling down there. The travel bug had been itching at us for a while. In Auston’s youth, he’d traveled a few times to France where his grandmother was from. Whereas David had traveled a fair amount in high school. He’d also heard stories from his dad and sister of their travels in Asia, which had piqued his interest too. Add to that the little traveling we’d done together previously, visiting Mexico and Canada, and our path seemed set. So, we created a plan to leave our jobs in a year’s time and set off on – as trite as it sounds – the adventure of a lifetime.
We researched heavily, sold our possessions, saved money, and accrued airline miles – mostly through travel and credit card points. Then we quit our jobs and bought two round the world tickets – 11 months and 10 cities for the low price of 300 dollars each. Luckily, our families were supportive . . . if somewhat concerned for our wellbeing as gay and relatively inexperienced travelers. Thus, we decided in January 2012 to start our blog – both to journal our travels and to keep our family in the loop – and let our moms know we were still alive to get respite from daily messages inquiring about our wellbeing. Aptly, our very first entry was about buying flights. All set, finally our travels could begin.
The Good, the Bad and the Good-Looking
We began by flying to Mexico, then explored Europe before heading down to Africa and along to India. Our blog was simply an informal recounting of our exploits at that point, and we had no initial intention of making it into a business. However, Auston had a eureka moment six months into our travels. Following the advice of fellow bloggers, who we encountered on our travels, we toyed with paid advertisements on our blog. From our first banner ad we earned a grand total of thirteen cents, but it was this event that set the ball rolling.
It was November 2012 when we were secluded in northern India up in the Himalayas within the city of Rishikesh – a beautiful place that contrasts tranquility with adventure sports, which is well worth a visit – when Two Bad Tourists came together. We locked ourselves in our hotel room there for three days, eagerly firing ideas back and forth and researching everything from social media strategies to search engine optimization tactics. We had a tug of war over the name – David still to this day insists “Journey Legs” was a good option – but ultimately, for better or worse, we settled on Two Bad Tourists. As much a concept as a name, we’d never felt like we were particularly good at being tourists. Memories of our recent trip to Berlin resided in our minds, where we saw almost nothing of the city . . . at least during the day. So, we found Two Bad Tourists to be an apt name for our traveling style which is, in short, doing whatever we wanted.
From India we continued our travels for six more months visiting everywhere from Thailand and Japan to Brazil and Peru. We both have so many memories of those months, which shaped not only Two Bad Tourists and our blog, but also us as people. Our favorite places are numerous, but Japan certainly stands out as an enigmatic and exciting location where past and future meet. We loved visiting ancient temples and then later trying to figure out the buttons on the advanced toilets.
Often it was the people we met that made a trip special. While couchsurfing – a site for sleeping on people’s couches for free – we met an amazing cast of people who provided us with unique insider perspectives on the places we visited. Sometimes it was the people we met on the road who amplified our experiences. We met a rather awesome – and ok…undeniably handsome – guy called Miguel and his friends when in Madrid who showed us a good time in the city – only marred by the fact that David lost his phone during the trip. Much to our surprise, when we moved on to Lisbon in Portugal, Miguel contacted us again to return the phone in person. He and his friend had already booked a trip to Lisbon and took us around the city and surrounding areas in an unforgettable adventure in their convertible sports car, proving to us that the world is indeed full of good people and lots of surprises.
It wasn’t all good of course and we had our share of misadventures. We spent a week on a volunteer trip in an orphanage in Guatemala, which was itself a great experience working with the children in a school, but what wasn’t quite so great is how sick we both got while there. We lay in bed for days recovering with nothing but the light breeze of a small fan to keep us cool in the unrelenting heat of summer. Later, as we were leaving a cafe in Buenos Aires, we went to grab our bag carrying our laptop that we had placed under the table only to find it had already been stolen. Still, we told ourselves it was all part of the experience, and the experience was incredible.
All good things must come to an end however, and our year finally ended. But despite wanting a base of operations, neither of us wanted to return back to our old lives in the States. Once more we put our heads together to plan how to keep Two Bad Tourists running and where to do it.
There’s No Place Like a New Home
For our home base we landed on three options: Mexico City, Buenos Aires, or Madrid. David had always wanted to learn Spanish and so why not kill two birds with one stone, we thought. Finally, we settled on Madrid as the most well connected to anywhere in the world and as one of – if not THE – most gay-friendly cities in the world. We only intended to stay a year but ended up falling in love with Madrid so much we just couldn’t leave. Honestly, what’s not to love about tapas, sunshine, and stunningly attractive men?
We continued our adventures, traveling several times a year, but at that point the blog still wasn’t enough to sustain an income alone. So, David found work as an English teacher and Auston as a remote engineer. After three years Auston switched his career to marketing and was eventually recruited by IGLTA (the International LGBTQ+ Travel Association). During this time the blog grew in the background and our website began to flourish with the addition of gay city guides and our weekly newsletter in 2014. The next big step came in 2017 when we were approached to host and promote gay sailing trips around Europe. This sparked the flame for us later running our own gay group trips.
A year later we made the difficult decision to end our relationship, but we remain best friends and business partners which has meant that the breakup did nothing to stop the inexorable progress of Two Bad Tourists. A further bump in the road came with Covid in 2020 putting a stop to any international travel. Auston, like many, was furloughed from his full-time job. But his extra time was pumped into the business, and Two Bad Tourists grew to the point where we were able to make it a full-time career.
Things only moved upward from there when we were approached by a new streaming app to launch our Queer Travel Chat podcast – by coincidence on the 10th anniversary of our blog. This podcast added that personal touch we were looking for, letting us connect with both other parts of the LGBTQ+ travel industry and our readers. Shortly after we hosted our very first gay group trip to Barcelona and Sitges in May 2022. The same year we connected with Virgin Voyages to host trips on their cruise ships throughout Europe.
Our story doesn’t stop here of course, and Two Bad Tourists continues to grow and adapt to the new age. Our team has expanded and so have our plans. We’re working on creating brand new city guides to our website, launching new gay group trips – including one to Madrid our home city and a gay pub crawl – along with making a third season of Oueer Travel Chat utilizing video as well as audio. As new opportunities emerge, we have a few other travel projects in the works…but we’re keeping those under wraps for now.
Being a Bad Tourist
We’ve learned a lot about the world at large and ourselves, both on our travels and from running Two Bad Tourists. Stepping out of our bubble taught us it’s a big world out there and there’s no right or wrong way to traverse it. As LGBTQ+ people it is easy to feel that the world at large is hostile and unwelcoming to us, creating a vicious cycle resulting in inertia. However, queer visibility is important and travel is an important part of that, while putting personal safety first of course. We hope that by sharing our story others will be inspired to follow in our footsteps.
Whether you’re visiting Spain – our beloved home country – with us on one of our gay group trips, taking part in a sailing trip through the serene islands of Croatia and Greece, or climbing the Himalayan mountains solo, gay travel is always an enriching experience – and we can enrich the world almost as much as it does us. We’re a partnership but that doesn’t mean you have to be in a relationship or part of a group to travel. In fact, the majority of our guests on our group trips are solo travelers looking to meet like-minded gay explorers, as much as discover the exciting destinations we offer. As Two Bad Tourists, our goal is simply to share experiences and help you create memories. After all, isn’t that what travel is really all about?
