Fictional dispatches
Travel stories from real places.
The maps are accurate. The catastrophes are not. Fake Travel News turns real journeys into strange, human-led travel fiction for readers who like their wonder with a clear label.
Find your first dispatch →What kind of travel stories?
A good travel story does more than move a character from one postcard to another. It changes the temperature of a place. A familiar street becomes a clue. A delayed bus becomes a terrible decision. A coastal town becomes the one place a spy was not supposed to develop feelings. You get the idea. We take the real world seriously enough to make the imaginary parts worth believing in for a while.
Every Fake Travel News story begins with a real destination. The streets, landscapes, local history, travel observations, and photographs come from actual journeys. Then the reporting gets unreliable. Barcelona acquires an alien problem. Moldova is visited just before the end of the world. Slovenia’s coast becomes inconveniently entangled with espionage. These are not travel guides, and they are not attempts to pass fiction off as fact. Each dispatch is unmistakably labelled as fiction, because the skeptical deserve fair warning before they pack for an apocalypse.
That balance is the point. Travel is already full of altered states: jet lag, missed connections, unfamiliar languages, a restaurant menu that appears to have been translated by a poet under pressure. Fiction lets us push those feelings one stop farther without pretending the place itself is a prop. The destination remains real, specific, and worthy of attention. The trouble is entirely ours.
Choose your first complication
Pick a mood. We will supply the real place, the invented danger, and just enough emotional consequence to make the return flight feel personal.
Story · Oct 23, 2025 · 9 min read
Moldova Travel Blog: My Last Country Before the World Ended
Read story →
Story · Sep 8, 2025 · 10 min read
Slovenia Travel Guide: 24 Hours to Die on the Adriatic Coast – A Spy’s Last Adventure
Read story →The non-fake method
Real fieldwork, then a controlled loss of perspective.
The traveler behind Fake Travel News has visited 61 countries and taken thousands of photographs. That matters because the stories are not made from a generic idea of “somewhere abroad”. They grow out of texture: heat on a walk uphill, the shape of a square after dinner, a roadside view that deserves more than a swipe, the strange dignity of a local bus station. The setting does not need a dragon to be interesting. We merely reserve the right to add one if the scene asks nicely.
The writing is human-directed and co-written with AI. The research, concepts, characters, emotional arcs, and creative direction are set by the person who travelled there. AI helps develop drafts, variations, scenes, structure, and flow. Then the work is revised, reshaped, and judged by a human editor with the final say. There is no secret automation pretending to be a memoir. The process is stated plainly because readers deserve to know what they are reading, and because mystery is much more useful inside the story.
If you want practical travel information, the site’s field guides keep the facts attached. If you want the version where a quiet town may be concealing a parallel dimension, the story archive has you covered. Both approaches begin with respect for the actual place. One simply has a much higher chance of ending in a suspiciously glowing basement.
For readers who travel in two directions
Some travelers read because they are planning a trip. Others read because they are trying to remember the version of themselves who had not yet gone. Fake Travel News is for both, plus anyone who has ever looked at a beautiful city and wondered what would happen if the normal rules stopped answering their emails.
You might be here for a story after a real trip, looking for a place to land after the photos are sorted. You might be here before a trip, hoping to feel something about a destination before the reservations begin. Or you may simply be a reader who likes cities, coastlines, small towns, bad timing, and characters who discover that the scenery has opinions. No passport is required. A tolerance for minor unreality helps.
There is no correct way to read a travel story, but there is a useful one: stay alert to the difference between the setting and the claim. When a story sends someone into a locked museum after midnight, enjoy the museum, enjoy the midnight, and do not email the local tourism office demanding the key. The locations are invitations to look more closely, not evidence that ordinary civic life has been replaced by a portal system. We are delighted that this needs saying, and we are saying it anyway.
Readers who arrive through a particular country can follow familiar names into unfamiliar trouble. Readers who arrive without a destination can let a genre make the decision. Pick the story that sounds most like the kind of day you would not want to have alone. The archive is built for wandering, which is a respectable travel method right up until it involves a suspiciously confident stranger holding a map. Bring curiosity. Leave the emergency contact card somewhere convenient.
The stories travel across genres because places do. Some lean toward science fiction and the strange. Some are tender, funny, or anxious. Some involve spies, supernatural interruptions, or a deeply avoidable misunderstanding in a region known for its food. The common thread is not a formula. It is a belief that a place becomes more memorable when a story lets it be complicated, funny, beautiful, and a little dangerous without losing sight of the people who live there. The best fictional detours leave you noticing the real destination more carefully on the way out.
Start with one dispatch, then follow the trail wherever it leads. The archive is arranged for browsing, the field atlas lets you explore the real locations, and the newsletter brings the newest reports directly to readers who would prefer not to depend on a social feed to discover their next fictional emergency. The mailbox is optional. The fictional emergency is not.
The reliable way to hear from us
Get the next strange thing first.
New fictional travel stories, sent to your inbox before the rumour reaches the airport lounge.
Questions from the skeptical
Are these travel stories real?
No. The stories are fiction, clearly marked as such. The places, travel, research, and feelings that sparked them are real.
Who writes them?
They are human-directed and co-written with AI. The traveler behind Fake Travel News directs the work, researches the places, and makes the final editorial decisions.
Where should a new reader start?
Choose the trouble that suits your mood: alien trouble in Barcelona, an apocalypse in Moldova, or a spy adventure on Slovenia’s Adriatic coast. Then browse the full story archive when one fictional emergency is no longer enough.