We Are Travel Girls Founder, Becky van Dijk, Shares Her Travel Tips!

Tell us a bit about yourself and your blog
Hi, my name is Becky van Dijk and I am the founder and editor or female travel community blog We Are Travel Girls, blogger at BeckyvanDijk.com and founder of Travel Girls Getaways, educational retreats, active escapes and trips for the adventurous female traveller! I am half English, half Dutch, currently living in Bali and will be moving back to the UK later this year! 

How did you get started with your blog/business?
I was interested in starting a blog, and working on a website and my social media when I realised that whilst I had lots of travel tips to share so did so many other women around the world and at the time there was not a platform that was consistently bringing these travel stories to an audience in one place. I started a feature Instagram account @wearetravelgirls where I shared beautiful images of women around the world. The page quickly grew in popularity and then together with my friend and now business partner we decided to launch a website where women could share their own travel articles to inspire more female travel. We launched the site in June 2016 and since then grown the community, hosted events all over the world and ran trips in Bali and Japan, next up we have an impact trip to Malawi, Blogging Retreats in Bali and a luxury adventure to Morocco. 

What is your favorite travel app and why?
Travelibro is a cool app for following other travellers and seeing their itineraries and trips in specific destinations you plan to visit. 

How do you find good deals for traveling?
I find often the most expensive part of travelling is the flight. Its usually relatively easy to find budget places to stay in a location, but getting a good deal on flights is harder. I simply use Skyscanner and set up alerts for pricing so when the prices drop for routes I am interested in I get an alert. I also aggressively try and collect airmiles. My best tip for collecting miles is to check if the airlines you are collecting miles for have a shopping partnership set up. British Airways and Virgin Atlantic both have this, so whenever you are making a purchase of virtually anything (clothing, make up, home goods, garden furniture) see if they have a partnership with that store you plan to buy form - you just click on the link via their site and then it tracks your spending and you get extra miles. For example in the UK, you can get 12 miles per 1 pound spend online at Selfridges if you first click on it via the British Airways website!

How do you discover fun things to do in new places you travel to?
I use other peoples blogs, Instagram and Pinterest. I actually find Pinterest to be the most useful way of finding hidden gems in a place I am visiting. I always create a board for the destination and save images of places I want to go along with relevant blog posts. This also helps if you don't speak the language in a destination and can show a taxi driver a photo - this helped us a lot in South America!

What is your next travel destination and what do you have planned so far?
My next trip is to Malawi with Travel Girls Getaways. Vanessa and I will be hosted 12 girls as we go on an adventure through Malawi, head on a Safari and also take a few days to work with some women in the local communities and schools. We are excited for this trip as it is our first impact trip that directly gives back to the country we are visiting. Whilst the group will be donating their time to mentoring young women, we wanted to go one step further and raise funds for some specific projects. So far we have raised nearly $7,000 which will go towards providing sanitary care items for girls who miss school each month due to not have sanitary products, secondly we will be giving money for the final year students to go on a safari and see the wild animals in their own country and if we can raise even more we are hoping to pay for a year of the nurses salaries in one of the local hospitals.