About Jacqui
Jacqui Gibson writes about travel, food, old buildings, clever people and lots more.
Travel writer
Jacqui is an award-winning New Zealand travel writer based in Wellington.
She writes guidebook and online content for Lonely Planet and is regularly published in the Sunday Star Times and The Post for Stuff Masthead Publishing; on stuff.co.nz for Stuff Digital; and in the Otago Daily Times for Allied Media.
Her stories feature in Explore (AU), AA Directions (NZ), MiNDFOOD (NZ/AU), Condé Nast Traveler (US), Adventure.com, BBC Travel, Luxury Travel (AU), NZ Herald & others.
Her beats or special interests include:
Wellington city and the Wellington region
regenerative travel
accommodation (for reviews)
women's solo travel
adventure travel and adventure cruising
hiking and the outdoors
city walking tours
city and regional destinations (for reviews)
culture and heritage
culinary and wine travel
flights (for reviews)
destinations that are top of mind (or should be) for New Zealand and Australian readers who love to travel.
Industry memberships
New Zealand travel writer Jacqui Gibson at the IPW in Denver, USA in 2018. Today she’s a regular attendee of TravMedia’s Australia IMM event held every February in Sydney. (c) Jacqui Gibson.
Hosted travel
Jacqui travels independently and courtesy of tourism and destination agencies. Past hosts include Tourism Fiji, World Journeys, Bali Hilton Hotel, Switzerland Tourism, Tourism Australia, Cook Islands Tourism, the Solomon Islands Visitors Bureau and more.
Every year Jacqui attends TravMedia’s Australia IMM (International Media Marketplace) global networking event for travel writers and industry reps.
“Working with Jacqui Gibson is a breath of fresh air! She is fun, curious and easy going. She is adventurous and hard-working. Jacqui produces thoughtful stories; not your run-of-the-mill travel stories. Jacqui goes deeper to find meaningful stories that resonate with current affairs. She continues to write stories and supporting social media long after her visit. I highly recommend working with Jacqui and would have her back to the San Juan Islands in a heartbeat.”
- Barbara Marrett, Communications Manager, San Juan Islands Visitors Bureau.
Feature writer
Jacqui’s features appear in Heritage New Zealand, DWELL, E-Tangata, Wilderness, New Zealand Geographic, Shepherdess and VetScript magazines and IPANZ’s Public Sector Journal.
Copywriting
A copywriter for more than 20 years, Jacqui turns out websites, brochures, annual reports and other content, including video, for government and business clients.
Grants
In 2018, Jacqui received an Aotearoa New Zealand Science Journalism grant to write about an iwi-led science initiative in Northland. In 2021, Jacqui received a Public Interest Journalism Project grant from NZ On Air to write a feature called The Living Forest for Wilderness magazine.
Awards
In 2019, Jacqui won the International Food, Wine and Travel Writers’ Association (IFWTWA) Excellence in Journalism Award, was a finalist in The Foodies, the New Zealand Food Media Awards for Best Feature Writing and took out the 2019 Agriculture Journalism Encouragement Award recognising excellence among journalists new to agriculture reporting.
In 2023, she was joint runner-up in the Voyager Media Awards for travel journalism. The awards are open to print, digital and broadcast journalists, video journalists and photo-journalists and photographers throughout New Zealand.
Book credits
In 2025, Jacqui was one of 50 writers (the only Kiwi!) selected to feature in an anthology of travel writing called Wild & Inspired, Celebrating 50 Years of the Australian Society of Travel Writers published by the ASTW.
Her story, Saving the night sky: New Zealand’s craziest experiment yet? was originally published by BBC Travel in 2022.
Cover of Wild & Inspired, an anthology of Australian and New Zealand travel writing published in 2025 by the Australian Society of Travel Writers. (c) Jacqui Gibson.