A longtime journalist, Laura Del Rosso started freelance writing in 2003.

She continues with Travel Weekly as a contributing editor and writes for other publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, AAA Traveler, Away.com, Vacationcruisesinfo.com, Southwest Airlines' Spirit, Frommers.com, the Boston Herald, Meetings and Conventions, MeetingsFocus, TravelAge West, California Construction. She contributed research material to the New York Times and the 2012 edition of the best-selling book 1000 Places to See Beofre You Die.

Laura caught the writing bug early, starting as a reporter at her high school newspaper and later at her hometown paper, the Pacifica Tribune, in Pacifica, Calif.

She earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from San Jose State University in San Jose, Calif., and later worked as a general assignment reporter at newspapers in northern California where she covered education, city councils and wrote features.

Laura started with travel trades as features editor of TravelAge West, a regional publication, and later moved to Travel Weekly, the industry's leading travel trade news magazine.

Among the stories she covered over 16 years as a bureau chief were the mergers and acquisitions of travel companies during the dot-com boom and bust, the struggle of travel agencies to survive, the impact of the Internet, terrorism and economic slumps and the growth of adventure travel, ecotourism and other niche markets.

As bureau chief, she traveled to Mexico and Latin America, Asia and Europe, writing about emerging and solidly established destinations and attending industry conferences. During this time, she also contributed chapters to two books, Frommer's Honeymoons in Mexico and Fodor's San Francisco.

In addition to Great Escapes: Northern California, she is the author of "Selling Special Interest Travel," a manual for travel agents and others who want to learn about sales and marketing of niche travel products, published by The Travel Institute of Cambridge, Mass.

In 2005, Laura won the Society of American Travel Writers' Silver Lowell Thomas Award for travel news/investigative journalism in Travel Professional magazine. In 2010 she won a second Lowell Thomas award for her audio podcast San Francisco's Embarcadero and Ferry Building.

Laura was born and raised on the San Mateo County coast just south of San Francisco where her father, who emigrated from Italy, had an artichoke farm. Laura speaks Italian fluently, travels frequently to Italy and has worked on Italian-English writing and translation projects.

She is a member of the Society of American Travel Writers and the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

For the last 25 years Laura has lived and worked in San Francisco, always within distance of the foghorns that bellow on the bay.