An Interview with Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson is the editor of and top contributor to A Luxury Travel Blog, a site with 120,000 monthly visitors and more than a million social media followers. We first interviewed him back in 2013, so he’s clearly a veteran who is doing something right! It was time to catch up again…

What is A Luxury Travel Blog about and how do you differentiate it from other sites covering the high end of the market?

As the name suggests, it’s all about luxury travel! It’s written with luxury consumers in mind and has a global coverage that spans everything from affordable luxury to the ultra-exclusive.

A Luxury Travel Blog was in fact the first blog in the world to focus exclusively on luxury travel—nowadays there are many but we are different in being a multi-author platform with contributions from over 800 different writers to date, most of which are people who are themselves working in the luxury travel industry.

What was your history before becoming a travel editor and blogger?

My academic background is in Geography and Geology, which was followed by a PhD in Glaciology for which I spent time working in Greenland.  My personal background is also in tourism, having been a Partner in a family-run, luxury self-catering business which has since been sold.

When I was writing up my PhD thesis (a long time ago now!) was when the Web first came along, and so I started dabbling then, doing Web design and marketing for the tourist industry.  I am a Director of The Dedicated Partnership Ltd., which is an internet marketing company catering specifically for the tourist industry. Nowadays this primarily consists of A Luxury Travel Blog which I’ve been running for almost 20 years now.

I am also a Director at Kendal Holiday Cottages Ltd., a small vacation rental business that I run with my wife.

What is the business model? What are the main income streams?

Initially, there was no business model. It was something that I did in my lunch hour as a labor of love rather than for its business potential. As interest in what I was doing grew, that soon changed although I never set out for it to be my main job.

Today, our primary sources of income come through guest bloggers, sponsored posts, and affiliate revenue.

I’m sure you get invited on some epic press trips. Are there one or two that have stood out as amazing experiences?

Absolutely! Although I have worked extremely hard on the blog for the best part of two decades, I count myself as very fortunate to be in this industry and have to pinch myself sometimes. One of the most memorable trips was a 10-day expedition across Nepal with Land Rover which included, amongst other things, a helicopter trip over Everest.

A family safari in South Africa and a twin stay with the family in Dubai and the Maldives also rank highly.

I remember in one conversation we had offline that you had more than 10,000 articles on your site. Is that still the case or have you been trimming?

That figure is over 12,000 nowadays (we slowed down a little, focusing on longer form content). They are still all on the site but we no-indexed several thousand of the earlier, lower quality articles in order to streamline things a little and put more focus on more recent content.

I think I may still yet create an archive where some of that older content is less accessible, so that the newer articles are able to take more of the limelight.

You’ve been at this a long time and have seen a lot of changes. What advice would you give to someone starting a new blog today?

Don’t!!

No… just kidding… but what I would say is don’t start a travel blog if you don’t love travel. That might sound stupidly obvious but it’s surprising how many people start a blog within a particular niche because they think it has money-making potential. In my opinion, you have to really love what you do—that needs to be the bedrock for anyone embarking on a career as a travel blogger.

Second, I’d say to find your niche. My niche of luxury travel is rather broad, but wasn’t at the time because I was the only person doing it. You want to find an angle that ideally nobody else is covering.

And thirdly, I’d ask yourself whether you have the perseverance to keep on going in a career that’s very competitive. Nearly everyone loves to travel and make a living from that it seems, so there’s a glut of people trying to earn a crust this way. To make it in this line of work, you’ll have to work hard and keep persevering even when the going gets tough.

Any travel bloggers who started their blogs before 2020 and are still around doing the same thing today are a shining example of what it takes…

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Paul Johnson is the founder and editor of  A Luxury Travel Blog ( www.aluxurytravelblog.com). Paul has worked in the travel industry for more than 30 years and has travelled extensively, from his home in Kendal, Cumbria (UK) to places all over the world. He is also a Director of The Dedicated Partnership Ltd., an online tourism marketing company with a client base that includes some of the finest hotels in the world.

Interview conducted in 2024 by Travel Writing 2.0 author Tim Leffel.