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Cathedral Cove, New Zealand
For the month of August, my husband and I will be traveling to Australia and New Zealand for an exciting adventure! We will be attending a wedding/family reunion in Australia, then we are off to the North Island of New Zealand doing research for a major location feature. Check back in September to see spotlights and guides to come! Otherwise, you can follow TypeATrips on Instagram and Twitter to see our journey as it unfolds. Thanks for checking in!
~Aimee
Let’s start with this – in complete transparency, I currently pay Pinterest a small amount each month to have my pins “promoted”, meaning they show up better on feed based on keyword searches. For example - if someone searches for "Barcelona", my Travel Guide to Barcelona pin may show up higher on the results feed. It’s the only form of advertising I do, mainly because it’s honestly the only one I can afford… if you remember, I don’t get paid to be a blogger (few do). I’m just a girl who loves to travel and plan, so I share my information with people and actually end up spending a lot of my own money from working a full time job to do it – having a website costs money and editing photos and writing content can take me an additional 20-30 hours a week after coming home from my normal job (not to mention the amount I spend to travel to the places I talk about). It’s also very hard to break into the travel blogging world – there are estimated to be over 700,000 travel bloggers today and it’s dominated by a handful of major players with huge budgets and millions of followers. So when I started my site last year, I knew it was going to be an uphill battle to get people to see all the hard work I was putting into my site, but it was a passion that I wanted to pursue despite the odds.
Ok, by now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with a social media battle? Well, this morning I received an angry comment on one of my latest pins about the best foodie spots in San Francisco. In the last few months since I started doing promoted pins, I’ve received 3 negative comments – all claiming that my pin is spam because it’s promoted. So far I’ve ignored them all, but this time I couldn’t.
Now, I realize that I could have easily ignored it or deleted it, but for some reason I just couldn’t let this one go. Maybe it’s because I didn’t realize that all pins that did not represent the average citizen were considered spam or that a pin relating to San Francisco restaurants should only be for the rich and elite who travel or just maybe I was feeling like I wasn't going to be pushed around this fine morning. Whatever the reason, the battle had begun…
My goal was not to be hurtful or rude (even though I did get a bit passive aggressive there at the end, which you'll see later in the "conversation"), but to take some time to explain that:
Those were my reasonings, but as you'll see, I don't think he got the message.
I must admit, I don’t love how much advertising goes on within Social Media today, so I get Jason's frustration. It can be distracting and I constantly feel like I’m being sold. With that said, it’s the main source of revenue for these businesses since they are otherwise free for users and I have to respect that in order to keep the lights on and pay their staff - making money is something they have to do.
I’m also truly thankful that I have a venue to get my blog posts and travel guides out there that I can actually afford. Without Pinterest, there is no way that people would see my work – outside of my mom, husband, some very loyal friends and co-workers (Ana & Iliana) and Grandma Hook (thanks for always reading Grandma!). My intention in using promoted pins is not to blow up anyone’s feed or to put my info in front of people who don’t want it, but there are going to be people who end up on the angry end of that effort no matter what my intentions may be. So maybe that’s just a reality that I have to learn to live with and simply accept the occasional angry comment. Luckily for me, behind every negative comment are dozens of kind, thoughtful, encouraging and appreciative emails and comments from total strangers who read my work. Thank you for that, they are truly what keep me going every week. In the end, I realize that this is just one battle in the war on random angry strangers out there but I'm pretty sure it's worth the fight - I type a lot so I've got big guns, be afraid!
I absolutely pride myself on getting great deals on fabulous trips, it's kind of my thing. But I'm not perfect and I was recently so kindly reminded of that both by Air New Zealand and my husband. So here's what happened...
In August my husband and I will be traveling to Australia and New Zealand for almost 4 weeks. Exciting, I know. But what's not exciting is the cost of flights; they can be upwards of $2,000 each from Los Angeles. So I set my focus on finding a deal - diligently tracking flight costs on a weekly basis and constantly checking sites for any changes. In December I found an amazing deal that allowed for a stopover in either Fiji or Cook Islands for practically nothing.
For $1,200 per ticket on Air New Zealand we were traveling from:
Woo hoo! Not only did I get a deal, but I've got us going to Rarotonga for 4 nights for some island relaxation. Here was my thought process: Rarotonga is a fairly unknown island compared to places like Fiji and Bora Bora and everything I was reading said that it was just as beautiful, less expensive and way less crowded. Score!
Now here's where the problem occurred. I started to really plan the trip a few weeks ago - creating a detailed budget, researching places to stay and what to do, etc. When it came to Rarotonga... my island dreams of laying on white sand beaches in front of my five star hotel for next to nothing was very quickly fading into the sunset. I discovered that while it's off season in New Zealand, it's high season for the Cook Islands because all of the cold Kiwis travel to the island to escape winter! On top of that, it is the island's centennial making it extra busy and there are only a handful of high-end, luxury accommodations available making them even more expensive. What did this mean? Let me break it down for you...
Well, spending over three grand on four days was not what I was thinking when I booked a stopover in Rarotonga and I was devastated. After all of my planning and research and convincing my husband that this was a good idea, I had screwed up. Feeling like an idiot and in a panic of losing a small fortune I needed to figure out a plan B. Here were my options...
A) Of course, I could always go with a cheaper, boring option for a hotel... but that wasn't so appealing (and to be honest, the accommodation options were pretty mediocre in general).
B) We could just swallow the money and go (and risk for the next five years hearing from my husband that I spent more in a couple days than he paid for his last car).
C) We could pay the cost to change our plane tickets and stay a couple more days in New Zealand instead (literally take a handful of hundreds and throw them into oblivion).
Being a numbers gal, I busted open a new Excel sheet and a white board and started crunching numbers. I won't bore you with all of the dirty details (unless you like that sort of thing), but long story short I figured out that changing our tickets and painfully paying the penalty of $250 per ticket to stay extra days in New Zealand (taking into account the cost of food, activities and a super nice hotel) would still ultimately save us nearly $1,000 instead of going to Rarotonga. We both agreed that this was the best option for us and the opportunity of spending more time in Hobbitville sounded pretty awesome.
So in the end, I lost us more money than I saved, but sometimes that's the price you pay for traveling. Type A or not, planning trips is hard and at times frustrating, but worth it in the end.