Heidi Sarna

Based in Northern Virginia near Washington, DC, Heidi Sarna is an award-winning travel journalist whose work is shaped by a globetrotting life that includes 17 years in Singapore and earlier years in New York City.

She holds an MA in English and American Literature from New York University, with a concentration in journalism. Her work has earned the prestigious Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award in the categories of Best Cruise Travel Article and Best Editorial Travel Website.

A longtime contributor to Frommers.com, she has also written for Condé Nast Traveler, CNN, Travel Weekly, The Points Guy, and Cruise Critic, in addition to numerous newspapers, bridal magazines, and guidebooks for Frommer’s and Fodor’s. She is the co-author of Secret Singapore (Jonglez Publishing, 2021), a guide to the city’s hidden heritage treasures.

Her expertise spans small-ship cruising—particularly river, canal, and coastal voyages carrying fewer than 300 passengers—as well as India, where she has traveled annually since the 1990s, and Southeast Asia, where she lived for nearly two decades. An advocate for active travel, she seeks out opportunities to explore by bicycle, whether on day rides or multi-day journeys.

Over the course of her career, she has taken more than 130 cruises and visited 78 countries. Her earliest international travels began with a family road trip from central Pennsylvania to Quebec, where she learned her first words of French—lait and poulet. Soon after, a 10th-grade school trip to Germany sparked a lifelong passion for exploring the world.

When she’s not on the road, she’s planning her next journey—preferably with an aisle seat for easy access, unless traveling with family, in which case she happily claims the window.