Biography
Marko Ayling is a writer, producer and TV host from San Diego, California, currently based in Mexico City. He is the son of Rob Ayling, a New Zealand-born lawyer and entrepreneur, and Jill Maninger, a Pan Am flight attendant. Ayling graduated cum laude from UCLA in 2008 with B.A. degrees in Economics and Political Science and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While at UCLA, he interned at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., and served as the department’s campus representative during his junior year.
After university he worked in economic development and micro-finance in rural India, where he began publishing travel dispatches via a newsletter and blog. He then traveled overland from Singapore to St. Petersburg via the Trans-Siberian Railway, before relocating to Spain to teach English and freelance travel articles. During this period he contributed to OffTrackPlanet and authored guidebooks to the Basque Country and Buenos Aires. He also worked summer seasons as a deckhand on yachts, based out of Palma de Mallorca.
Returning to the U.S. in 2011 to cover the Occupy Wall Street protests and break into journalism, Ayling interned with Democracy Now!’s Spanish-language team in 2012, subtitling and translating segments for digital audiences. Encouraged by a family friend to combine his travel journalism with his younger brother Alex’s camera work, they co-founded the YouTube travel show Vagabrothers in 2012. In 2013 the pair won the My Biggest, Baddest, Bucket List competition, producing a 50-video series across 25 countries with weekly articles syndicated on MSN. Over the next decade Ayling wrote, produced, and hosted more than 400 travel videos, growing the channel to 1.3M+ subscribers and 100M+ cumulative views. He also collaborated with premium brands including Mercedes-Benz and Visa, and dozens of state and national tourism boards such as VisitBritain and Visit California. He is an alumnus of YouTube’s NextUp (2016), Virtual Reality Creator Lab (2017), and Creator-in-Residence (2018) programs.
On television, he hosted Tastemade’s prime-time series Basic vs. Baller: Travel at Any Cost and served as a field producer on Netflix’s The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals. In 2020 he moved to Mexico City, where he created Cuéntame (2021), a bilingual storytelling series and reading club presented in Mexico City, Oaxaca, San Miguel de Allende, Los Angeles, New Zealand, and beyond. He also founded, produced, and hosted Sexico City, CDMX’s first live bilingual blind dating show. Hundreds of first-time performers have taken the stage through Cuéntame, which has expanded into solo-show development and the production of plays and one-person shows. He is the author of The Missive on Substack.
Ayling’s work has been recognized by the Obama White House (2014), the Travel Video Awards (Best Hosted Video), the International Travel & Tourism Awards at WTM London (Silver, Best Digital Influencer, 2018), and the Shorty Awards (finalist).
He holds dual U.S./New Zealand citizenship and resides in Mexico City.
