A Proposition
I was contacted today by Lidia Nyiri, a PR Consultant for TravelGrove.com. She asked me if I would write a blog post reviewing her company which, “helps users find cheap offers on airfares, hotel and car rentals, cruise deals and vacation packages”.
She said the review didn’t have to be nice. It could be anything really. All I needed to do was include three links; a link to Travelgrove, one to flights for a specific city like, oh, uh, I dunno, say, Chisinau in the Republic of Moldova, and one link to a travel guide. I picked the Taiwan travel guide because I wanted to take a look and see if they knew what they were talking about.
As it turns out, Travel Grove’s travel guide for Taiwan was a nice little 500-word blurb that summarized the country about as well as is possible in 500 words.
Since I’m going to the Philippines on Friday, I gave their flight search a whirl. The flights from Taipei to Manilla listed were about what you would expect to pay for flights from Taipei to Manilla during Chinese New Year, around $600USD, which is a little more than triple what my girlfriend and I paid for tickets on a new budget airline that we happened to stumble across.
But hey, that’s why I don’t use big travel websites.
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I'm a travel writer and photographer currently based in Tainan, Taiwan where I founded and edited Xpat Magazine, one of Taiwan's largest and longest-running expatriate periodicals. My writing and photography has been published in various print and online publications including Taiwan Today, the Taiwan Fun Magazine Group, and TransitionsAbroad.com. I speak English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese (to varying degrees) and am available for assignment. I can be reached through the form on the contact page of this website, or at xpatmatt (at) gmail.com.
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We all get that sort of spam all the time. I never thought someone would actually follow up on that, even sarcastically.
:S
Yep, I never thought I would either. But, I was bored when the email arrived, and looking for something to write a post about. I wonder if I'll get any traffic from their linkback.