Obituary: Kate Rice, award-winning reporter for Travel Weekly: Travel Weekly

Kate Rice, an award-winning reporter and editor who covered travel advisor news for travel trade publications including Travel Weekly and Travalliance, the former publisher of TravelPulse, died Dec. 26. She was 70.

Rice, who grew up in Sparta, Wis., majored in journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and freelanced for newspapers across the state. She moved to New York City to pursue a degree at Columbia University, and it was there that she “fell into” a job at a travel publication, according to her obituary.

A veteran travel journalist, Rice first worked for Travel Weekly in 1984, where she was an associate editor handling cruise, Alaska and special sections. She also worked for Leisure Travel News and Business Travel International, and her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Golf Digest and ABCNews.com, among other outlets. From 2005 to 2012 she was the executive editor of Travalliance.

She rejoined Travel Weekly in 2012 as a senior editor, where she covered travel advisor news, marketing, technology and distribution. She received ASTA’s Travel Journalist of the Year award in 2015. Her cover story “The War on Human Trafficking” received an Eddie award from Folio magazine and an Azbee from the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

She resigned from Travel Weekly in 2015 to take a position at a virtual-reality travel company. She also worked at South African Tourism as a marketing manager.

Rice had a long-held passion for skiing. Inspired by her father’s ski-jumping career, she joined the Sparta Ski Club, selling burgers at high school football games to fund ski trips. Once in college, she spent her vacations skiing out west. She lived in Aspen (to be a “ski bum,” her obituary said). And after receiving a stage-four cancer diagnosis and six weeks of treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Rice in 2023 began working seasonally as a ski instructor in Park City, Utah, and DJing for a local radio station.

She also championed social and environmental causes, including helping to found a refugee resettlement group in New York and, as her obituary said, “roping [her daughters] and a rich mix of people in Greenfield Wis., into a standoff with a multinational mining company that threatened the pristine lands of West Central Wisconsin.”

Rice is survived by two daughters, Eliana and Gavriela. A funeral mass will be held Jan. 11 at 10 a.m. at St. Patrick’s Church in Sparta, Wis.