Nilou Motamed boarded her first airplane when she was 4 months old, lived at Paris' legendary George V hotel at age 7, and spoke three languages by her 10th birthday. She's had the travel bug ever since.

Fluent in English, Spanish, French, and Farsi, Nilou has crisscrossed the globe a dozen times over, staying in hundreds of hotels and eating in the world’s top dining rooms—as well as the best down-and-dirty food markets and street stalls. Her travels have taken her from Italy to Indonesia, Mexico to Mauritius, always in search of the elusive secret find.

As Features Director & Senior Correspondent for Travel + Leisure, the world’s most-read travel magazine, Nilou covers a wide array of subjects ranging from restaurants, hotels, and shopping to global trends in travel, culture, and style. She is the driving force behind T+L’s food coverage, including the annual Food & Travel issue. Nilou also oversees the magazine’s signature “It List,” a yearly roundup of the world’s hottest hotels and resorts.

Nilou regularly shares her travel expertise on NBC’s Today, as well as The NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America, The Early Show, CNN, and E!, among others. She was the host of Ultra HD’s restaurant series Reservations Required and was a host of the Travel Channel series Travel Spies.

Nilou is a graduate of the State University of New York at Binghamton, and also attended the Sorbonne University in Paris. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Peter Jon Lindberg.