Austin Hill is co-founder of the Travellious blog which urges us to travel smarter, often and rebelliously.

1 What is the aim of your blog?

Travellious is a blog for the independent traveler: offering advice, inspiration, and resources for planning your own travel adventure. Too often we’ve seen and experienced what we call “passive travel,” where the urge to run through a checklist of landmarks overshadows a real travel experience. Rather than providing you with a travel guide, we’re setting out to educate and empower others to create their own unique travel experience. If we can get just one person to travel who has never traveled before, or get someone to reconsider how they travel, we’d consider it a success.

2 What prompted you to start your blog?

We’ve both been avid travelers for the past 10 years or so. The more we’ve traveled, the less we found ourselves relying on travel guides and more on our friends’ advice, our intuition, and the virtual advice available from the Internet. The impetus to start a website came from our want to share our approach to travel: traveling simply, smartly, and actively. The site reflects those goals and provides a forum for our advice, inspiration, and education with the intent to instill our readers with the confidence to travel on their own.

3 What has been the hardest aspect of having your blog?

Letting ourselves just go and not be so calculated about it. We spent months planning and brainstorming trying to build a strong foundation, which has been a great asset. However, we sometimes need to remind ourselves to just go for it and learn from experience, just like in travel.

4 What is the funniest thing that has happened to you running your blog?

We’ve been blessed to not have any major incidents (knock on wood), so unfortunately we don’t have any tales of woe to recount. The closest we’ve come was our latest site upgrade, which kept us up all night . It reminded us of studying for exams in college….too much coffee and sleep deprivation can lead to delirium and some funny conversations.

5 Is there anything you would do differently with the benefit of hindsight?

We would have spent less time planning and just start writing. Yes, a blog needs a strong foundation and direction, but the process is what helps you define and redefine your goal and message. Experimenting, brainstorming and just trying anything and everything is what got us to the point we are today.

My comments – I totally agree with you about many people’s idea of travel being having a list of landmarks and feeling that they have missed out if they don’t manage to whizz around them in jig time. I’d advocate seeing less properly than this mad dash. during which you see nothing properly. I love the advice from Jan Morris, “The best way to find out about a place is wander around. Wander around, alone, with all your antennae out thinking about what’s happening and what you see and what you feel.”

I think it may be a positive thing that you spend a fair amount of time planning your blog, rather than just launching into it. There are so many travel related blogs out there and I believe that one’s blog has to have something unique to attract and retain readers, whether that is the personality of the author(s), the style of writing and/or the focus of the content.

It must be great to have a blogging partner, so can discuss things and share tasks as it can be quite isolating working away on a blog on your own.