Rick Steves is a popular public television host, a best-selling guidebook author, and an outspoken activist who encourages Americans to broaden their perspectives through travel. His mission: to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando.
Rick taught his first travel class at his college campus in the mid-1970s—and 50 years later, he still measures his success not by dollars earned, but by trips impacted.
Widely considered America's leading authority on European travel, Rick produces a best-selling series of guidebooks and is the author of Travel as a Political Act. He is dedicated to providing all Americans with access to travel information and has made extensive resources available for free on the Rick Steves' Europe website; via the Rick Steves Audio Europe app; and in Rick Steves Classroom Europe™, a searchable database of short, teachable video clips.
A longtime supporter of public broadcasting, Rick produces and hosts public television and radio shows that air across the nation.
Rick is the founder of Rick Steves' Europe, a travel business that operates a successful small-group tour program that brings more than 30,000 people to Europe annually. The company contributes annually to a portfolio of climate-smart nonprofits, essentially paying a self-imposed carbon tax.
Through the philanthropic wing of his company, Rick supports and works closely with many advocacy groups and organizations whose missions fit his own, including Bread for the World. He has been a member of NORML since 2003 and has been instrumental in the legalization of marijuana in states across the country. He has also provided $9 million in funding to build two neighborhood centers in his community, donated a 24-unit apartment building for homeless women and their children to his local YWCA, and owns a hygiene center that ensures homeless people in his town have access to showers, laundry, and other basic services. On the music scene, for 15 years he has paid all the concert hall rental fees for his local orchestra.
And Rick’s connection to music? His father (Dick Steves) was a band director and piano tuner who was beloved by music lovers in the Seattle area for what they called “the Steves sound of music.” Back in the 1970s and 1980s, he imported the world’s finest pianos from Germany and sold them out of his store, “Steves Sound of Music.” When Rick was 14 years old, he traveled to Europe for the first time with his father to visit piano factories, including Bösendorfer and the German Steinway. As a student at the University of Washington, Rick played the sousaphone in the Husky marching band and taught piano lessons in a studio next to his dad’s piano store. Eventually, he gave away his 50 piano students and turned his small recital hall into a lecture hall and the headquarters of his growing travel business. Today, Rick employs 100 Rick Steves’ Europe colleagues on the same street, and—as he has for decades—he spends about three months a year in Europe, researching guidebooks, fine-tuning his tour program, filming his TV show, and making new discoveries for travelers.
To recharge, Rick plays his fine German grand, relaxes at his family cabin in the Cascade Mountains, and dreams of taking his grandsons (Atlas and Dashel) to Europe someday. He lives and works in his hometown of Edmonds, Washington, where his office window overlooks his old junior high school.
