Oneika Raymond Is a Bona Fide Travel Junkie

Media personality, journalist, and keynote speaker Oneika Raymond isn’t your typical travel influencer. A bona fide travel junkie, her adventures have taken her to over 115 countries (!) on 6 continents—making her a lifestyle guru of sorts.

A thrill-seeker who’s always in the midst of planning her next trip, Raymond has bungee jumped over the Zambezi River, fished for piranhas in the Amazon, and climbed active volcanoes in Guatemala and Ecuador, amongst her many adventures.

As the author of the award-winning travel blog “Oneika the Traveller,” she is the recipient of a Gold Medal in the 2018 SATW Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition for Best Travel Blog and was also named Wanderful’s 2019 Creator of the Year. But incredibly enough, she didn’t grow up traveling but discovered a passion for it quite later in life.

“I grew up in Toronto in an immigrant family—my parents were born and raised in Jamaica,” she recalled in an interview with Passion Passport. “We didn’t really have much of a culture of travel.”

It was only during her studies in university that she took a leap of faith. “Eventually I realized it was travel that was really feeding me. It wasn’t necessarily the idea of being away from home, but the idea of discovering, of learning something new every day, of stretching my boundaries and living outside of my comfort zone—that’s what I really enjoyed.”

Now, her platform means she gets to reach others and inspire them to live a more adventuress life. Dedicated to inspiring people of color to see the world, she’s a fierce supporter of women who travel and has keynoted at the Women in Travel Summit, at Women’s Travel Fest.

“In the early 2000s, when I was traveling and writing, there were very few black people doing this online,” she notes. “I got a lot of positive feedback.”

Follow her for those good vacation vibes.