As you might have noticed I’ve been posting some random things lately.
Here is why:
I don’t consider myself a “real” travel blogger, I do take insane amount of pictures which I share on my site but it was never a source of income. Travel is my hobby, my passion, something I consider myself pretty good at. I started as everyone else flying mostly around their continent, at that time all over Europe. Then I went big, not only that I decided to move to Australia but thought it’ll be fun spending some time in Asia the months prior to my arrival in Sydney. It was fun indeed.
I had a 4 year visa but life had different plans and routed me to New York a year later, and as most of American miles-and-points-freaks I got bitten by the “let’s churn credit cards and make millions of miles” bug. First year was the warm-up, couldn’t be anything else since I didn’t have any credit. I got a crappy Bank of America card with a low limit and started working on it. Did my homework, was an avid reader of sites like ThePointsGuy or BoardingArea and started to dream about flying like the pros.
Rule #1 was setting a goal, don’t just go insane and start applying for cards. My destination was Bali, to be specific, on Thai A380’s business class. For that I got the United MileagePlus card, and a British Airways card. The first one to get me there while the latter one helped me hop around Asia, I had the return covered with American miles I accumulated over the year. As for the hotels I went the old-school way: worked my ass off and payed for it! I flew there on Swiss and Thai, it was a long journey but awesome.
Since then I applied for more credit cards than I can count and burned millions of miles. Flew fantastic airlines and experienced things I never imagined I would. I started writing about it simply to give back to the community of whom I learned so much from. I’m far from a NatGeo photographer or a Pulitzer winner journalist, English is not even my 1st or 2nd language, yet I enjoy it because I hope one day I can be the help to someone deciding between the best airline, cabin, destination or whatever matters to that person.
Yet sometimes it sucks!
Sometimes you just want to skip a lounge and sleep an extra hour at your hotel, go to sleep right away after your red-eye is airborne or just relax in the lounge and board at your convince. This is not how my travels are. It’s systematic. If it’s a new lounge I get there plenty early so I can try everything, then an hour prior to boarding I head to the gate and hope I can be the first one to board so I can take pictures of an empty cabin. Dinner time and not hungry? I still try it just so I can have an idea how the catering is. And the list continues…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you “feel bad for the guy who flies sometimes like the 1%”, please let me continue before conclusions…
I start sorting out pictures, hope no edit is needed and start writing. I take my in-flight notes, I type things worth mentioning in my iPhone. It takes time, you write for hours, upload it, share it on every social media platform, forums like Flyertalk and then hope someone will click on it. Then nothing happens, a year or two goes by and if you’re lucky your mom still reads your posts.
A lots of thoughts but the main one is “Why the FU@#K am I still doing this?”.
It’s the wrong question. The real one should be “Okay, I’ve learned a lot. What do I have to change so people give a sh!t?”. No one needs another credit card specialist or a detailed minute-to-minute review of a flight, there are more than enough of both. Just find your own voice and the right audience will find you! That’s why I’ve been cutting back on overanalyzing flights or hotels, summing up things in shorter posts with less pictures and focusing on things I didn’t before. I’m a very sarcastic person so ranting about airlines, finding mistakes, better values is what I enjoy the most. Those are things I prefer writing about and believe it or not, the respond was better the past 6 months than the 3 years prior to that.
So what’s the point of this post? Not much, these are just my thoughts, the only thing this blog should be about…