Travel Matters

In this final episode from TBEX Europe 2023 Kalamata, you can meet two guests.

First, Rick talks to Elena Sergeeva. With a decade-long career in Sales & Marketing, she co-founded Travel Bloggers Greece in 2015 with the purpose to unite like-minded individuals and to educate the Greek market on how to work with bloggers. She is the founder of several travel blogs. She also works with JayWay Travel, one of the sponsors of TBEX.

She did a session at this TBEX called “Destination Blogging Community and DMO Partnerships: Value and Opportunities” where she talked about how working with blogging communities provides new marketing opportunities and continued growth for Andros Island. The session covered the needs of a DMO from the local travel industry – Projects to empower the island’s footprint in the global tourism market.

And our last interview from TBEX Europe 2023 is with Ivan Bengeri from Croatia. In 2013 he quit his 9-to-5 job to travel around the world. In November 2014, www.bengeri.com travel blog happened, and since then, Ivan has been blogging and traveling full-time.

So far, he’s been to 60+ countries, walked a Camino de Santiago (800 km) in September 2018, represented Southeastern Europe (SEE) as a travel influencer on Kerala Blog Express 2019, and in 2020 he launched Bengeri.travel agency to share his love for traveling.

In this episode, you can meet travel blogger Eric Stoen from the family travel blog Travel Babbo. He used to work in healthcare but was addicted to travel. So, in 2014 he quit his job and started the travel blog to inspire more people.

So far, he’s been to 101 countries and seven continents. Hear how he got started and how he grew his blog. You can also hear him talk about the time he took his kids to Antarctica.

Rick has tried to get Eric to be a speaker, but he keeps saying no. Will this interview make him change his mind?

In this episode, we have two guests. Cazzy Magennis and Bradley Williams are the travel blogging duo behind Dream Big, Travel Far.

Using captivating content and an intelligent approach to sharing their stories on mainstream media, their website reaches as many as 350,000 page views a month.

In their session, they shared the step-by-step details of how they have landed a large number of high-profile mainstream media features in the last 18 months – which has, in turn, helped them to 3-4x their blog’s monthly traffic.

This is their first TBEX, their first time as a speaker, and their first time as guests on a podcast. Have a listen and hear how they did.

In this episode, we have two interviews. First, we meet Brennen Bliss, a US Search Award-winning SEO consultant and principal at the US-based travel and tourism-focused SEO agency, Propellic. The agency forms successful and creative SEO campaigns for its clients. Brennen is passionate about travel; sending more people to incredible places is part of his lifelong mission. Brennan did a double session called “Advanced SEO: Hidden Strategies to Compete in Search.”

Then we have a conversation with Anna Kalogeropoulou, Deputy Governor of Tourism for the Region of Peloponnese, a destination for all seasons. Kalamata is one of the fastest-developing cities in Greece. This modern city has been re-introduced to the world as a tourism destination.

In this episode, we meet Caroline Makepeace (Caz) from yTravelBlog and This is Raleigh about Raleigh, North Carolina.

Together with her husband, Craig, she’s been traveling the world since 1997 and since 2007 with their two daughters.

The White House invited them to attend a travel summit as one of the top digital travel influencers in the world in 2014, and in 2020 they were granted a green card for their ”extraordinary ability in the art of travel blogging.”

Caz and Craig are from the Central Coast of Australia and now live in North Carolina – but they like to call the world our home.

She was the Opening Keynote Speaker for TBEX North America in Billings, Montana, 2019. We planned to have her on Travel Matters back then, but it wasn’t possible to make it happen. So, better late than never… Enjoy this conversation with an extraordinary travel blogger.

In this episode, we have an interesting conversation with pioneer travel blogger Melvin Boecher from Germany.

Melvin is the founder and CEO of Travel Dudes, co-founder of the Social Travel Summit, former COO of iAmbassador, and with more than 15 years of successfully running his business, he is a pioneer of professional travel blogging.

His Social Media are very popular. On Twitter, he has accumulated around 250.000 followers, and Melvin appears on over 8.500 recommended Twitter lists – this ranks him in the top 3 in travel. His Facebook page has over 115,000 fans, and his Instagram has around 50,000 followers. He’s also on YouTube, where he and his team post some great videos.

Hear how he started as a travel blogger, how he built his travel blogging empire, and what he shared in his session at this TBEX.

In this episode, we have an interesting conversation with Catharina Fischer about sustainable travel.

Catharina is one of the leading experts in influencer marketing and a digital leader with over ten years of experience in tourism. At TBEX Europe 2023 Kalamata, Greece, she gave an interesting talk about the impact of tourism trends on travel content creators.

Before she was Head of Social Media at the German National Tourist Board (GNTB), she was in various marketing positions in the tourism industry. At the GNTB, she implemented the international Social Media Strategy in over 12 markets & created in 2013 the first international influencer campaign for Germany.

Since 2015 she has been working for the consulting network Tourismuszukunft. Here she supports destinations, hotels, and tour operators, mainly in DACH countries, with their digital marketing. In 2016 she initiated the industry think tank ‘Change4Destination’ which is dealing with the question of the ‘future of public destination marketing’. The think tank white paper became a must-read in the German-speaking markets.

Furthermore, she created the VideoSummit – the leading conference for video in tourism with top videographers and video bloggers worldwide. 

Connect to Catharina Fischer on LinkedIn.

In this episode we say “mojn” to Jessica Schmidt from Hamburg Marketing. By developing, communicating and coordinating the Hamburg brand, they highlight the locational attractiveness of Hamburg and the Hamburg Metropolitan Region in Germany and abroad. 

Hear how they work with content creators.  

Martin Solhaugen is a filmmaker, youTuber and photographer from Oslo, Norway. Martin has worked on global projects for Tourism-boards, luxury hotels, and high-profile clients. Martin has been traveling the world for the past 6 years in pursuit for cultural and visual expressions. With a big heart for visual storytelling and a unique eye for detail, he has worked on global projects for Tourism-boards, luxury hotels and high-profile clients.

He did two sessions at TBEX Europe 2023, and in this conversation, he shares some tips, and talks about how the same video made him more money on Facebook than on YouTube.

Chris Lau talks about his YouTube channel, SeeLauTravel and then we get into a long conversation about selling – an important skill to have as a travel content creator.

With 10+ years of experience in a professional-level sales role, being recommended by other world-class creators, and having helped almost 80 creators from around the world, Chris also has a Mentor Program where he teaches how to travel for free, get paid for your work, and really make this into a lifestyle. See more about that on SeeLauTravelMentorProgram.com.