Travel FAQs part 1: How I started travelling full-time

Last Updated on February 4, 2025 by Alexx

This is part 1 of my Travel FAQs series, focusing on how I came to travel full-time in the first place. I’ll be sharing more FAQ posts soon, with practical advice about preparing for full-time travel, planning a big trip, budgeting, health and wellbeing on the road and loads more.

Creators always say “so many people have been asking about my skincare routine so I wanted to share it with you”, when in reality no one has asked about their skincare routine, but I promise this isn’t that!

I genuinely get hundreds of questions in my DMs about solo female travel, full-time travel, budget travel and in-between travel, responsible travel, planning a round the world trip, and everything else that comes with those. And that’s totally understandable, this lifestyle can seem so far out of reach, I used to have all these questions myself.

I love love love chatting to anyone who is looking for advice and inspiration, and I am endlessly grateful that you trust me as an authoritative voice in this industry, but I thought it’d be much more helpful to have a permanent FAQ section of my website covering the most asked questions! This way you can come back

This started as one post but at the 5000 word mark I’d only just finished the ‘how I started’ section 😂 so I’ve decided to split the FAQ categories into their own pages instead, beginning with the most common question by far, how do you get into full-time travel?

If you’ve got any burning questions that I haven’t answered then let me know in the comments and I’ll add it to the post 🥰

If you’re new here…

Kia ora, I’m Alexx! I’m a Kiwi travel blogger who lives out of a suitcase while travelling solo for most of the year.

I’ve been sharing all my adventures (and misadventures) on here since 2017 when I moved to London, and I quit my 9-5 in 2019 to take my little corner of the internet and turn it into an actual real job while travelling full-time.

Six years (and one global pandemic 🫠) later and it’s 2025, I’ve just finished my fourth extended round the world trip, and I’m at home for my annual 2-3 months of recuperation before I hit the road again.

Now let’s get into the questions.

My early life & education

Did you travel much as a kid?

More like local holidays rather than big trips like I do now!

My parents owned a small business and my mum was a teacher when I was young, so we were limited to school holidays (so expensive 🫠) and close distances. We went to the same beach town every summer, 1.5 hours from my hometown, and we had a few skiing trips to Queenstown (in the South Island) and a couple of trips to the Gold Coast in Australia for the theme parks.

The only long-haul trip we took was a few weeks in the UK and France when I was 15. And let me tell you, 15-year-old-me was certainly not appreciative of being taken away from my friends in the school holidays to spend hours in art museums in Paris*. Sorry Mum and Dad 🙃

*To be fair I’m still not a museum kinda gal, but I’ll never say no to Paris!

What did you study?

Throughout high school I had no real vision for my career, I was quite academic so I kept up with maths and sciences as well as English and French, but couldn’t see myself working in those long-term. My high school was pretty limited in the subjects they offered (fairly common for the 2000s!) and people were definitely encouraged to choose a traditional career path like doctor, nurse, teacher, accountant, etc.

It was clear from my early years that the traditional life was not for me, but at that stage I didn’t know what the other options were.

I saw a careers advisor when I was 17 and they suggested a specific university for me based on my learning style, and then I chose my field of study from there. I decided to do a double degree in marketing and psychology, it took 4.5 years in total.

My studies aren’t directly linked to what I do now, but there’s no denying that they’ve helped guide me here. My university had an exchange programme which I took advantage of, this gave me the travel bug, then my first internship was in marketing for a travel agency which I wouldn’t have been considered for without a marketing degree.

That job turned into six years in the travel industry working with tourism boards and global travel companies, which undoubtedly set me up nicely for a career in travel blogging.

Would you recommend studying anything in particular for someone who wants to travel for work?

There’s no specific thing to study if you want to work while travelling, there are travel-related or travel-friendly jobs in almost every industry you can think of.

You could study something traditional like medicine or education and then get a job as a locum doctor or international school teacher, or you could study graphic design and work as a freelancer from a beach bar in Bali. The opportunities are endless.

My top tips for tertiary education if you want to spend a lot of time travelling are:

• Take any and every opportunity for international travel through your education provider, whether that’s conferences, university exchanges or research trips
• Knuckle down and finish your studies as quickly as you can, the world will be here for you to explore once you’ve got that (very expensive) piece of paper
• If you have capacity for elective classes, choose ones that give you transferable knowledge (like anthropology, sustainability, etc.) or skills (like digital media/creation, international business, etc.). Electives aren’t only a way to one-up other job candidates, they can also prepare you for stepping out into the big wide world.

Did you do a gap year?

I didn’t do a gap year, mostly because I knew I would never go back to studying if I took any time off after high school!

Did you do a university exchange?

I sure did, I spent six months studying at San Diego State University in California, and it was the catalyst that sparked my love for solo travel.

It was daunting to arrive in the USA alone, I literally knew no one on the entire continent, but that feeling of total anonymity is now one of my favourite parts of my life!

Fun fact: My university had a range of exchanges to choose from around the world, including Canada, Denmark, France and Singapore, but as a teenager I was obsessed with the tv show The OC so as soon as I saw California on the list I knew that was my only option.

Did you always want to travel the world?

Not really! I hadn’t done much international travel, and I didn’t study anything travel-related at high school (no geography, history or classics), so my understanding of the world was pretty limited to what I was consuming in terms of tv and movies.

Hence my life decisions being based on an angsty teen drama 🙃

During my time in the US I got a taste of what life was like beyond the borders of my little corner of the world, and I was obsessed. It became quite clear that travel was going to play a big role in my life going forward, whatever that looked like!

Life before travel blogging

What was your job before being a travel blogger?

After coming back from my exchange in the States I had to find a marketing internship for the last project of my degree, and I managed to secure a spot in the marketing team of a global travel agency’s New Zealand head office. This turned into my first full-time job!

The travel agency was for students and young people, with a focus on round the world trips and epic adventures, and my job entailed writing content for the website and brochures, planning social media content, running marketing campaigns, partnerships with tourism boards, and loads more.

I spent four years in the NZ team before getting the opportunity to transfer to the global head office in London, UK.

Why did you move to London?

A working holiday in the UK is a rite of passage for young Kiwis and Aussies, we get access to a three-year ‘youth mobility visa’ up to the age of 35 (but when I went it was two years up to 31).

At 25 I’d just split with my boyfriend at the time, I wasn’t making anywhere near enough money to buy a house so settling down was well and truly not in my foreseeable future, so moving abroad just made sense. The company I worked for had offices throughout Europe, Asia, the USA and South Africa, but London was calling 💂🏼‍♀️

The main reason I moved to London was because it’s infinitely better connected than New Zealand, the idea of heading to Paris for a weekend or finding £15 flights to a city I’d never heard of was impossible to comprehend as someone who lived 3+ hours and hundreds of dollars from our nearest neighbouring country.

New Zealand is sooo far away from the rest of the world, the shortest flight to another country is about three hours (Fiji or Australia on a good wind day!) and to reach another continent it’s at least 9-10 hours to Asia or 11-12 hours to the Americas. Europe is 24 hours if you book the fastest connection, more like 30-40 hours for the more affordable routes 🫠

What was it like working in a travel desk job?

In many ways my marketing job at the travel agency was a dream job for me, I was paid to figure out how to inspire young people to travel! I had practically full control of our social media channels and our website, and I was part of the team who came up with campaign ideas across retail and digital channels.

In NZ I worked in a small head office which was like a family of travel buddies, all with a passion for seeing the world. Most of them were older than me and many from other countries, which showed me that life didn’t have to follow the path of university > career > mortgage > marriage > kids. I left that office eight years ago now and I still see my ‘work friends’ when we cross paths on our travels, we were incredibly lucky to build such strong connections in our workplace.

Moving to the UK was a different story, the head office was huge with a verrrrry different culture, super inefficient work processes which caused mega frustration, and lots of silos so things fell between the cracks. My team was focused on global partnerships with tourism boards and tour operators, and I was spending most of my time writing pitches and analysing results rather than actually working on any travel content. I was bored out of my mind!

What made you decide to leave your 9-5?

As I fell out of love with my job at the travel agency, I started questioning my long-term career plans.

Originally I moved to London with the idea of working my way up in the head office, getting sponsored by my company to stay on a work visa after my youth visa ran out, and eventually running the global marketing team.

Once I got there and had a front-row seat to the reality of corporate management, even in an industry I’m passionate about, this was not so enticing.

The company was struggling, we had three different CEOs in two years and countless changes in middle management, and I realised that the people at the top were so far removed from the things I loved about my job, like writing about epic destinations, sharing travel stories, and educating young people about the world and why they should see it.

My boss was also a niiiightmare (like completely put me off having a boss every again), withholding my career progression and replacing anything interesting from my workload with arduous, unsatisfying reports, so I started looking elsewhere for work satisfaction instead.

Just before I moved to London I’d started this blog and an Instagram account, mostly to share my travels with my friends and family, but with my desk job going so badly I started taking the idea of content creation more seriously.

In my job I was on the receiving end of lots of creator pitches, hourly emails from people asking for free flights, accommodation and tours in return for promoting our agency, and I got the opportunity to put together a few creator campaigns working with OG travel Instagrammers and bloggers. Seeing that this was an actual job that could genuinely provide an income was a game changer for me!

My working holiday visa was coming to an end in mid-2019, I definitely wasn’t ready to leave London but without being sponsored in my job (and tying myself to my shit boss/downhill company for five years) there was no way to stay. I also wasn’t ready to move back to New Zealand though, so I decided to take an absolute leap of faith and set aside an entire year to travel full-time, with the aim of turning my blog and social media channels into an asset rather than a black hole of time, energy and money.

Did your travel agency job allow you to travel much?

I was super fortunate to have a few trips on my company’s dime in the six years I worked there, but head office staff (like the marketing team I was in) don’t get the same travel opportunities as travel agents themselves.

The trips I took were to Thailand, Fiji and Indonesia, and I was there as a photographer to capture visual assets to use in our campaigns.

Outside of dedicated work trips I was able to make the most of industry rates though, which helped me (and my family and friends) save money on personal trips! Working for a travel company gives you access to discounted rates across airlines, accommodation, tours and experiences, but the offers change constantly and depend on your employer’s relationships within the industry.

As an example, some of the deals I got during my tenure were:

• 50% off some group tours + 25% off for my friends
• Industry rates for flights which were about half price, but very limited travel dates and always outside of peak season
• 30% off lots of hotels
• Super cheap travel insurance policies

Starting out in full-time travel

How did your friends/family react when you told them you wanted to travel full-time?

I think they were all entirely unsurprised!

My visa was almost done and there was not a single neuron in my brain that wanted to move back home, so it wasn’t a shock to them when I told them I’d be hitting the road.

But what did shock them perhaps was the way I was going to travel, because I was about to start something wild called the 52 in 52 Project…

What was your 52 in 52 Project and how did you come up with it?

Ahh, the good old days!

In 2019 I was already on the pulse of travel content thanks to my job, and I could see Instagram becoming so saturated with the same shots, the same destinations, the same messages. Everyone was quitting their jobs to travel, digital nomadism was becoming mainstream, so I knew I needed a unique angle to stand out from the crowd.

The spark of a lightbulb came from a place many good ideas do – desperation to escape my soul-crushing desk job and shitty boss.

To get through my depressing and demotivating work days I used to scour Skyscanner’s Everywhere tool, dreaming of where I could reach with £20 if I quit tomorrow. And because I don’t do things by halves, those quick dopamine-releasing searches turned into a full week-by-week spreadsheet to see how far I’d get if I let the cheapest flights decide my destiny.

Do you see where I’m going with this 👀

My job situation really blew up when my boss’s incompetence started impacting my opportunities in the company, and with six months left on my visa and the seed of my Skyscanner idea well and truly planted, I started making plans to wrap up my 9-5 career and tackle content full time.

Three months before my visa ended I told my company that I was leaving, there was no turning back!

After trying (and failing) to convince me to stay, they moved me into another team for an interim management position to plug a gap between an outgoing employee and their replacement. This got me away from my boss (thank god) and a short-term but chunky pay rise.

The day I handed in my resignation, shit got serious. I jumped onto Skyscanner and plugged in ‘From: London’ and ‘To: Everywhere’ on the day my visa ended, and the cheapest flight was to Paris for £26. I booked it.

Next I looked from Paris to everywhere the following Tuesday, cheapest flight was to Zaragoza in Spain (which I’d never heard of) for £26, and I booked it. Then it was Brussels for £18, then Warsaw for £12, then Vienna for £15, and so on.

I had to book all my travel in advance for visa reasons, logistical planning, general sanity etc. so I booked the first six months in one chunk that night and then booked the next six months once I’d started the trip.

Are you ready to have your mind blown?

In the first six months of the trip, from London to New Zealand via 30 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia, the base cost for flights/buses/trains came in at a ridiculously cheap £1495 (+ £407 for extras like a checked bag and seat selection because I’m a window seater for life). WILD.

Some quick and important notes:

• This trip was entirely for content purposes and I would never encourage anyone to travel at this pace or in this way. The idea was for me to showcase 52 different ‘one week itineraries’ around the world, highlighting the perfect way to experience a destination with just one week, rather than wanting anyone to copy the zigzagging route I took.
• I didn’t fly every week, I used the cheapest flight to determine my itinerary and then took a train or bus if timing and budget allowed

• But I did fly more than I ever would now. I was on a super tight budget, and while buses and trains can be cheap if you’re taking convenient routes, crossing the continent from somewhere like Zaragoza to Brussels would’ve been ten times more for a train than the flight. The trip was based on this idea of cheap travel deciding my route with the Skyscanner Everywhere tool, and there wasn’t (and still isn’t) a tool for finding the cheapest trains/buses in this way, so my flights were an unavoidable by-product of the project. If this tool gets invented I’ll do it all again using overland transport only!
• I tracked my carbon emissions and offset them all through Co2nsensus

Would you do the 52 in 52 Project again if you could turn back time?

Looking back almost six years later, this project was a huge learning curve for me, especially when it came to understanding the environmental impact of fast-paced travel and low cost flights.

Setting off on my first extended solo adventure was terrifying and electrifying, spending a year visiting so many new places, moving every week, completely alone with no one else to help with planning or content or general survival. Responsible tourism in terms of culture, local communities and impact on the ground were all priorities for me, but to be completely honest my carbon footprint was not at the front of my mind.

While my co2 emissions from the first nine months of the 52 in 52 trip were actually lower than the previous nine months living in London (with a return trip home for a wedding, a work trip to Indonesia and various European getaways), if I could turn back time I would certainly do it differently.

Perhaps I’d choose the destinations based on Skyscanner’s cheap flights, then I’d share the process of turning those pin points into a low-emissions itinerary only using flights where absolutely possible? That could be a fun challenge!

These days I’m ultra-aware of the environmental impact of my job and I do everything I can to minimise my carbon emissions, including travelling exclusively by train/bus/ferry when I’m in Europe, and opting for overland travel whenever it’s an option. This is actually one of the reasons I travel full-time, because it avoids unnecessary return flights to and from New Zealand after every destination.

I’m not a perfect traveller by any stretch, but I have come a long way since my first year of full-time travel! One of my all-time favourite quotes is a Maya Angelou one, “when you know better, do better”, and this is so relevant to travel. When we see new places and meet new people we learn new things, and it’s up to us to use that knowledge to become more responsible global citizens.

I can’t turn back time and not take those flights, but I can make better choices now and help others do the same.

What did you do with all your stuff?

Moving out of my house in London was the start of my current reality, where my personal belongings are split across various countries and continents. It’s quite stressful haha.

My mum was in London for my last week there so she kindly took a bunch of important things home for me, I shipped a big box to NZ through PSS International Removals, and I left a suitcase in a friend’s wardrobe.

What did you have to organise before you go?

This one needs it’s own full post for actual instructions, but here’s a quick checklist of what I had to sort out before hitting the road:

• Finding a comprehensive travel insurance policy
• Getting an international travel card (I use Wise)
• Shutting down UK things like my gym membership and contents insurance
• Sorting out storage for my stuff
• Changing my phone plan so I could keep my number but wasn’t paying monthly
• Getting an international phone plan for roaming (these days I just use eSIMs though!)
• Organising any visas (I didn’t need these until the second half of the trip though)
• Vaccinations for Southeast Asia
• Getting important documents scanned and digitised
• Getting an international driving permit
• Booking my first few weeks of accommodation so I wasn’t stressed immediately
• Stocking my first aid kit
• Backing up all my photos and documents and giving the hard drive to my mum to take back to NZ

I’m tired just looking at that!

What was your first year of travel like?

If I had to sum up the 52 in 52 trip in one word, it would be: WHIRLWIND.

It was magical of course, I visited so many places I had never been before and some I’d never even heard of, like Baku in Azerbaijan! I was accidentally in Paris for Bastille Day fireworks (which needs to be on your bucket list by the way), Transylvania for Halloween and the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia for Christmas.

I was solo for most of the time but I also did a couple of group tours, met loads of people in hostels, had some friends come and join me in a few places, and managed to get home for a week for a cousin’s wedding in the middle of it.

But I cannot overstate how exhausting this pace of travel is, it was extremely optimistic (okay, delusional…) of me to think I could sustain an entire year of country-hopping while somehow trying to share content and make money along the way 🫠

At the nine month mark I was pretty damn tired, but my wish for a rest was maybe taken a little too seriously, because you know what happened…

And then 2020 happened…

Where were you when the pandemic hit?

At the end of January 2020 I was en route from Australia to Laos (for £127, not bad!) when news of the virus started hitting countries beyond China’s border.

I remember re-stocking my first aid kit at a pharmacy in Melbourne when the pharmacist recommended I take lots of hand sanitiser and masks with me, because she said they might run out in Asia. I totally brushed it off.

Laos was fine, Vietnam was fine, but my next three stops of Taipei, Macau and Hong Kong were all cancelled for obvious reasons. There was no strong ‘return home’ message yet though, so I managed to get to week #39 at the start of March 2020 in the Philippines before the world shut down.

I was on a tour in the Philippines (with my faves One Life Adventures) when one girl in our group had a slight temperature and it was taken super seriously, understandably, resulting in her being taken by ambulance to a hospital five hours away and the rest of us being quarantined on an off grid island. She was fine in the end but tests were taking days, so they told us we’d be kept there until she tested negative.

Thinking about it now, we had the best quarantine location in the world! We slept in tents and drank rum around the bonfire under the stars, snorkelled with turtles and climbed coconut trees, and local guys caught us fish and brought fresh supplies from the mainland.

We had no phone reception for three days, and unbeknownst to us the world was literally shutting down. Luckily one of our boat trips gave us a spot of connection and our guide heard from his boss that the Philippines borders were about to close, so we had to make a mad dash to the island to get our stuff, to the mainland for medical checks, to the airport (a long drive) and then onto one of the last flights to Manila, before paying an eye-watering amount of money for urgent flights home. CHAOS.

What did you do during the pandemic?

New Zealand’s borders closed a week after I arrived (phewwww) and they didn’t reopen for almost two years.

We were extremely fortunate to have a lot of freedom within the country for most of that time, we had short but strict lockdowns that tended to last a matter of months at the most, but for the travel industry the impact of closed borders was financially devastating.

I lost all my income streams, my website visitors dropped to almost zero, and my freelance contracts were cancelled. Fortunately my business was entitled to government support like any other Kiwi business, but this was short-term and there was no additional support for the tourism industry who were the hardest hit by our border restrictions.

I’m so appreciative of the steps NZ took to keep our country safe and healthy, there’s no doubt we were one of the most successful places globally in terms of health outcomes, but the tourism industry suffered immensely and the impacts are long-lasting. Even by the end of 2024 our international visitors were only at 83% of 2019 numbers (source: MBIE).

Luckily my parents had space for me at home (thanks Mum and Dad!) so my living costs were minimal, I picked up a part-time freelance contract outside of travel and that kept me financially afloat for the two years of making no money from content. I poured my time and energy into business planning and upskilling, something I could never fit in while travelling full time, to ensure I was set up for success when the world reopened.

In the meantime I managed to see loads of Aotearoa too, visiting places in my own backyard I’d never been, including an epic three month campervan adventure exploring every region of the country.

Tourism brands had no income and therefore no budget to pay for content and coverage, but they did have empty rooms, quiet restaurants and bored tour guides, so I made the best of a bad situation and managed to collaborate with more than 50 local companies on a contra basis.

Back on the road for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025

Where did you go first when borders reopened?

New Zealand’s borders starting opening in March 2022, but we’d had some false starts in the two years prior so I gave it a month before finallyyyyyyy getting back to full-time travel, and I planned to be away for 10 months!

I started with three months road-tripping around the eastern coast of Australia, doing a Sydney to Byron Bay road trip and then driving from Brisbane to Cairns.

From Aus I jetted off to Bali, onto Canada to reunite with one of my best friends who lives over there, then New York and Boston in the US, four days in Iceland, mainland Europe for three months of train travel, back to my northern hemisphere home in London for the first time in three years, to Abu Dhabi for an epic stopover that I won at a travel conference, Sri Lanka for my first ever solo birthday, the Maldives local island of Dhiffushi, Singapore, Melbourne and back home.

Revenge travel? Never heard of it…

Where did you travel in 2023 and 2024?

After a few months at home to get work done and plan the next round, 2023’s adventure began.

The start of this trip was dictated by travel jobs I couldn’t move, so my flight route was very inconvenient and not ideal, but in nine months I visited the Maldives again (a conference this time), Anaheim in the US, Greece, London, Morocco, France, the Balkans, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy, a bunch of Europe Christmas markets by train, and then made my way home just in time for actual Christmas.

Another work and rest period in NZ came to an end in April 2024 and I set off again, and my plans were (for a second time) decided by conferences and collabs.

Australia first, Japan next, then the Maldives (this time it was for a competition I won!), a brilliant tour in Sri Lanka, Malaysia including Borneo, Vietnam, Bangkok, London, Greece, Albania, Puglia and the Dolomites in Italy, a Bordeaux barge cruise (random but fantastic), Vienna, Copenhagen, met my parents in Norway to join a sustainable cruise voyage up the coast, then London again for Christmas and some life admin before flying home via San Francisco.

What are you doing in 2025?

I’m writing this at the end of January, I turned 33 yesterday, and to be totally honest I have made a grand total of one plan for 2025 (a reunion in Japan for my Sri Lanka tourmates). It feels unsettling and freeing at the same time!

I’ll be back on the road for sure, but I don’t think it’ll be a 9-10 month round the world trip in a single direction.

More likely I’ll spend some time in Asia after Japan, perhaps visiting China, South Korea or Central Asia (all new destinations for me), before returning home for a month or two of winter adventures and then heading to Europe for my usual three month train trip in September, October and November. Who knows where I’ll be for Christmas this year, I’m open to suggestions 🎅🏼

Looking at full-time travel long-term

Will you travel like this forever?

After four years of full-time travel, I’m starting to feel the effects of constant movement. I’m running out of juice for travelling at this pace!

While I still love what I do, 2024 was the first year where fatigue and exhaustion occasionally overshadowed the excitement and fulfilment of exploring new places. These moments were brief, but they were a clear sign that it was time to reassess.

The challenge is that full-time travel isn’t just a lifestyle choice for me, it’s currently the most viable option professionally. I’d love to have a home base to travel from, but the logistics are tricky:

• New Zealand is too remote, the flight distances, carbons emissions and costs make it impractical for frequent international travel
• Australia is a visa-free option for me as a Kiwi, but while it’s better connected to Asia it’s still a long distance from Europe and the Americas
• Digital nomad visa options are growing but often require steady income streams through a salaried remote job or ongoing contracts, which don’t align with the variable nature of travel blogging

If I did manage to decide on a destination as my non-travel-home for the foreseeable future, I’m not sure how I’d balance the financial burden of having a base + still travelling a significant amount of the year.

If I rented a room, apartment or house, I’d need to be somewhere that allowed sublets, so I could have someone else to cover the costs if I was going away for a significant period. This isn’t guaranteed in many places so it’s something I have to consider.

I’d love to buy somewhere of my own, but getting a mortgage as a single, self-employed travel blogger is easier said than done! Not to mention wild housing markets around the world, especially Auckland, where the average house price is $1,223,608NZD as of Q4 2024 (£552,838/$686,791USD)!

I absolutely recognise that these are very privileged problems, having the freedom of movement and the income to even have these different options. I’m sharing them to give you an honest insight into the realities of transitioning from full-time travel to a more stable lifestyle, and to show you that even though it looks like some people look like they have it allllll figured out online, you never know what’s going on in the background.

What are the best bits of travelling full-time?

And what are the hard parts about full-time travel?

Let me say first of all that these are not complaints, I’ve designed this life to fit my own priorities and it has suited me perfectly up until now. But I want to be totally transparent with you!

There are too many people out there selling the dream of full-time travel and digital nomadism without sharing the not-so-fun aspects, so here is a raw, unfiltered, long list of the parts of full-time travel that I sometimes find difficult:

• Packing for an extended period on the road, having to think about weather in a destination you’ll be in six months from now
• Constant lugging of heavy bags due to aforementioned clothing that you won’t even need for months
• The sheer mental load of constant decision making and researching basic things like public transport, where to do laundry, how to say thank you etc.
• Not having access to home comforts or a guaranteed comfortable place to sleep for the foreseeable future
• Having to stay on top of global events and how they impact your upcoming destinations
• Missing important life events back home (though honestly I make such an effort to be around for these despite the cost, and I’m able to make it to weddings and birthdays for my friends abroad so this is kind of a win!)

• Constant goodbyes to new friends and not knowing when/if you’ll see them again
• Managing health issues and medication away from home
• Navigating the changing tourism industry as a creator who relies on collaborations to keep travel costs down
• My blog income being almost entirely reliant on Google’s algorithm
• Global inflation resulting in higher prices all around the world
• The horrible feeling of being sick in a foreign country
• Saying goodbye to family and friends who are too old to come and visit me or too young to understand why I’m leaving
• The ever-ticking biological clock as a woman in my early 30s

• Juggling time zones to catch up with people back home
• Banking/admin/business issues that require you to give a fixed address
• Not being able to buy things I like because I don’t have space or a house to send them to
• Digital storage management and back ups when I don’t have access to my home hard drives
• Feeling pressured to always be ‘on’ for content creation because I only have a short time in each place
• Keeping on track with business admin like expenses and tax
• Constantly switching between different languages, currencies and time zones

• Difficulty maintaining any routine for exercise, nutrition or sleep
• The exhaustion of introducing myself to new people constantly, often with the conversation following the exact same trajectory
• Never being able to commit to long-term plans because I don’t know where I’ll be in a year, or a month, or tomorrow
• The havoc that changing climates, cuisine, air quality and time zones wreaks on your body
• Balancing the need to make money from my content with having strong morals around responsible tourism and content creation (e.g. turning down well-paid opportunities with global chains, not hosting group tours because I would never sell spots on a tour I haven’t experienced myself, etc.)
• Dealing with tech issues without access to repair services or being able to claim under warranty

Omg you guys, that list got out of control haha. I promise that I actually really enjoy travelling full-time!

FAQs round one done and dusted! I’ve got the next instalments on my list for the near future, covering everything else you need to know about travel.

MY GO-TO TRAVEL PLANNING RESOURCES

Flights ✈️ I use Skyscanner to find the best flights for my trip and then I’ll always book direct with the airline to protect myself from having to deal with dodgy third parties if anything goes wrong.

Trains 🚂 If I’m travelling through Europe, I try to travel by train wherever possible! For an extended trip (2+ weeks) I’ll calculate if a Eurail Pass is worth it, or I’ll book point-to-point tickets through RailEurope or the local train operator.

Accommodation 🛎️ I book almost all of my accommodation through booking.com, they have a user-friendly website + app and many of their options are free cancellation, easily cancelled with a simple click of a button.

Activities 🗽I use GetYourGuide, Klook and Viator to look for activities in the places I visit, or I just Google ‘things to do in [city]’! P.S. If you book anything on Klook you can use the promocode FINDINGALEXXKLOOK to get 10% off

Travel cards 💳 I’m a Wise gal through and through, they’ve been my chosen travel card for more than five years now. You can easily top up your card from your bank account or through Apple Pay, convert your money to local currency, and spend money with minimal fees and the best exchange rates around.

Travel insurance 🩺 I use Cover-More NZ travel insurance for my own trips, I have a comprehensive policy and I’ve only had good experiences with them. Cover-More also has an Australian company, but if you’re from elsewhere then two popular insurance options for global travellers are SafetyWing (cheaper policy, lower coverage) and World Nomads (more expensive but significantly better coverage).

Luggage 💼 I travel with Samsonite Cosmolite suitcases, one 75cm check in bag and a 55cm carry on bag, and I absolutely adore them and will never travel with anything else! They are SUPER lightweight (2.8kg and 1.9kg respectively) so I have much more space for my actual stuff.

Camera gear 📸 I use a iPhone 15 Pro Max for phone photos/videos, and my camera kit includes a Lumix S9 (incredible lightweight full-frame camera, a game changer for travel creators!) with a 20-60mm lens, a Lumix G9 with an 8-18mm and 12-60mm lens, a DJI Mini 3 Pro drone and a GoPro Hero 10. I do all my writing and editing on my ASUS Zenbook 14, it’s lightweight but powerful enough for photo editing and intense blogging sessions.