Welcome to The Nomadic Network, a global community of travel-lovers!
Our mission is to create a space that supports and inspires you to travel better, cheaper, and more often.
We want to give you the tools and knowledge to confidently plan global adventures. Whether a short jaunt to a nearby city or an indefinite round-the-world trip, TNN aims to help the world travel — one traveler at a time.
At TNN, we give you the opportunity to meet other members by hosting events online and in cities all over the world! From small coffee shop chats and happy hours to informative travel presentations to group tours or conferences, we know how to have a good time and to ensure you make meaningful connections. Be sure to join us for an upcoming event!
The Nomadic Network is a place for people to connect, share, learn, and create friendships.
Get Involved
Building a travel community would be hard without, well, the community. That’s why we get so excited to meet fellow travelers around the world who are as enthusiastic about booking flights with points, finding the best street food, locating that lesser-known waterfall, or giving tips about awesome house sitting destinations. If you’re looking for new friends with the same interests as you, you’ve found the right spot. Welcome!
How you can get started using our website:
- Attend one of our virtual events to learn travel tips
- Meet new friends in your city by joining an in-person traveler meetup
- Start a conversation with similar travelers in our global groups
- Friend other members nearby and start chatting with them
- Travel with us on our group tours around the world
- Apply to be a Chapter Leader and help us bring the love of travel to your local area
- Volunteer at one of our in-person events
Anyone, from anywhere in the world can join TNN. As long as you’re 18 and older, you can join us. We just have one simple requirement: you LOVE to travel.
Meet Our Team
The Nomadic Network has three full-time staff members and a handful of event hosts, Chapter Leaders, and volunteers. Learn more about us, and if you ever see us at in-person events, be sure to say hello!
It takes a village to keep this community going. From tech and coding to design to fixing bugs to getting to scheduling social media or running the virtual and in-person events, we need a lot of help. We’re lucky to have the support and help of an amazing group of people.
So, without further ado, here they are:
Nomadic Matt, Founder
The Nomadic Network was created by Matthew Kepnes aka Nomadic Matt.
After a trip to Thailand in 2005, Matt decided to quit his job, finish his MBA, and head off into the world. His original trip was supposed to last a year. A decade and a half (and nearly 100 countries) later, he is still out roaming the world. He scuba dived in Fiji, was a poker player in Amsterdam, taught English in Thailand, got lost in a jungle in Central America, and broke down in the middle of Australia’s outback.
He’s the author of many books, most notably the New York Times bestseller, How to Travel the World on $50 a Day. His writings and advice have been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, Lifehacker, Budget Travel, Time, Yahoo! Finance, countless other publications, and on CNN and the BBC. He also regularly speaks at travel trade and consumer shows, leads group tours worldwide, and launched a non-profit called FLYTE, which sends students overseas to bring their classroom experience to life. He is also the founder of the travel media school, Superstar Blogging, and the TravelCon travel media conference. When not trekking the world, he lives in Austin.
Erica Virvo Hackman, Director
Erica has been on the Nomadic Matt team since she returned from living abroad in 2013. Her passion for teaching others to travel the world fuels her excitement about working with Nomadic Matt. She is extremely extroverted and loves putting together events for travelers. Through the Nomadic Network, Erica is able to engage with people from all over the world — which is perfect for her!
Erica has been traveling and living around the world since she was 20. In college, she moved to Doha, Qatar, to finish her degree. After that, she taught English in northeastern Thailand and South Korea, farmed on the island of St Vincent, organized farming cooperatives in Zambia, and spent extended periods of time working remotely in Vietnam, Cambodia, Dubai, Costa Rica, the UK, South Africa, and Ghana.
Erica loves getting to know people on her journeys. She loves sitting with families at their kitchen table eating and laughing, gushing with friends about local dating culture and crushes, cooking together, studying, farming, creating alongside each other, and attending festivals, parties, and weddings.
Maria Mallory, Director of Marketing & Communications
After studying abroad in Thailand in 2013, Maria knew she wanted travel to become her focus and sought opportunities to continue to explore more of the world, but also to make it a career path. She has a background in higher education, having previously worked for years in a university setting in both international admissions and study abroad. She also taught English in Taichung, Taiwan in 2016. After graduating in 2021 with her master’s degree in marketing, she was thrilled to join The Nomadic Network.
Maria is a people person, through and through. Whether she’s corralling her friends to join her for camping trips or hosting Beer Olympics in her backyard, she loves socializing and learning from others. She is based in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and dog and will gladly show you around if you decide to visit her hidden gem of a city. Some things you can join her for are brewery tours, dancing classes, yoga classes, music festivals, park picnics, motorcycle trips, karaoke, costume parties, or meet up with her on a solo trip in whatever beautiful country is a cheap flight away.
Amanda Kelly Espiritu, Chapter Manager
Amanda is a third culture kid raised between the US, the Philippines, and the UK and is a multi-hyphenate artist, author, executive producer, and global community builder. She’s been traveling around the world since pre-kindergarten with her family and often adventures with friends around the world. She taught summer school in Jamaica in 2012, solo-backpacked through Japan in 2015 and Japan in 2016, helped launch The Confetti Project internationally in Dubai in 2018, and led trips for Hacker Paradise in South America in 2020. She’s been working remotely since 2018 for months at a time in places like Japan, Singapore, Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, and Portugal.
Having grown up around the world, Amanda loves hearing people’s stories and getting people together around great food, for concerts large and small, and on trips with friends of friends and strangers they don’t know they’ll love yet. She’s often covered in paint from making wearble art, performing spoken word, taking people on photo walks to shoot new headshots for their dating profiles, and dancing from sunrise to sunset in gardens and on mountain tops.
Amanda has a background in marketing and event production and has often collaborated with artists, musicians, and creative entrepreneurs who love playing in the intersection of art, adventure, and advocacy. She’s often helping people launch their passion projects ranging from books to mixtapes, and from short films to companies all while self-publishing her own books, mixtapes, and short films, founding several communities, and founding her own creative production studio. She believes that by connecting to each other and amplifying each others’ stories we can make the world a more joyful and extraordinary place.
Chris Richardson, Website Developer
Chris does all the tech and developer work for the TNN website. He built it, keeps it running, fixes any errors, and is constantly updating it.
He got into the world of blogging after quitting his job, backpacking around Europe and, as all Aussies do, undertaking a working holiday in the UK. Like all who travel and fall in love with it, he didn’t want to go home afterward.
That adventure got him started travel blogging many years ago, which is how he first met Matt. He’s since repurposed his IT skills from his pre-travel life and formed his own business to help out other bloggers with their websites. Currently, he builds and runs all of Nomadic Matt’s websites, including FLYTE, TravelCon, Superstar Blogging, and The Nomadic Network! He’s now living the good life in Western Australia by the beach with his amazing family.