As the year comes to a close and we all survived the end of the world – lots of “best of” lists are coming out. I thought I would share what I feel like were the five best travel blogs of 2012. The criteria of my list was blogs that made me want to come back over and over with interesting, unique, and / or funny content. In no particular order – here were my five favorite travel blogs of 2012.

Ben / One Mile at a Time

Ben has a talent for drawing his readers into every detail of his life including where he should move and inviting people to dinner with him and his favorite flight attendant.

He traveled an incredible amount in 2012 – just check out his gaudy trip index list and see how much it has grown over the years. He is a great and entertaining writer that kept me coming back often.

Gary Leff / View from the Wing

With an amazing amount of posts through the year, Gary makes my list of best travel blogs. Whenever I see one of his posts appear on Twitter, I rush to read it as it’s always informative. His ability to take travel news and give a thorough analysis is unparalleled. Gary is the first travel blog that I ever read back in 2004.

I still don’t understand how he finds the time for all these points even after reading his post about time management.

If there’s one thing that Gary isn’t afraid of – it’s expressing his opinion whether it’s taking Chris Elliott to task or criticizing the TSA. He broke news of so many travel deals last year that I almost hated to ever be away from my computer for fear of losing out.

Matt / Nomadic Matt

Matt quit his job and started traveling around the world in 2004. If most people are used to living in luxury while traveling – Matt takes the opposite view, that it’s best to live and eat the locals on the cheap.

He has created some pretty exhaustive travel guides with tips and tricks of how to get the most out of your vacation destination.

Some of my favorite posts from him this year was his post on a horror situation in a hostel and how he survived in Stockholm for 5 days on only $100.

He definitely takes a different angle on travel and therefore made my best travel blog list.

Daraius and Emily / Million Mile Secrets

The on again / off again love / hate relationship by his readers made Million Mile Secrets part of my top five for the year. I love that Darius didn’t moderate any comments even when it got pretty heated about him supposedly “killing deals”. Starting in 2011, Million Mile Secrets has carved out a space in the crowded blogosphere with unique takes.

One of my favorite posts was Earning Miles with Money Order.

Greg / Frequent Miler

Greg lost his job in March and started blogging full time. We were all the benefactors of that. Greg introduced everyone to the Vanilla cards that spawned thousands of people stalking Office Depot for them. He also wrote about the Bluebird card. Overall he created a blog that interested me and came up with very unique ideas on how to accumulate points.

While there are countless other blogs out there, these five above were my personal favorites. I’m sure you have others as well – which blogs do you frequently visit?

Here’s to a great 2013 in our hobby!