Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Bernie and Petra Travelbuddieslifestyle . We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Bernie and Petra, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Bernie, the principle of a private higher learning institution in Johannesburg and Petra , who works developing electric cars in Germany, launched their Travel Buddies Lifestyle Instagram account in October 2020. It started as a hobby, but quickly grew into a loyal online community. Posting about our destinations with truthful descriptions, honest comments and relatable, unedited pictures, left our growing audience with the hunger for more. So we launched our website which we call a Digital Magazine rather than a blog earlier this year. Now we can write more about the places we visited and give our followers an even better idea of what to expect. We have a passion for travel and we want to take the community with us.

Our efforts have defied our wildest expectations, and now the hospitality industry is noticing it too. We were traveling like we do three to four times annually since we met eight years ago, when different hotels started asking us to stay over or partner with them in exchange for reviews and posts. And to think initially we created our Instagram page because we just wanted to share our experience with the world. And look at where we are now!

Of course, traveling with your best friend is priceless, and that is still the at the heart of our social media venture. We experience our normal holiday and show our normal holiday on Instagram.- we don’t let Instagram take us on holiday.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Most of it was answered on the previous page. We are Bernie from South Africa and Petra from Germany. We started our Instagram account in October 2020 and launched our website in May 2022 as a digital Travel Magazine. We are known for our truthful hotel reviews and we are very proud to say that we’re keeping our Instagram page and website real. We are taking the engagement with our followers very serous.
We share our holiday with our followers and share our experience. We are not trying to tick off the places with the most beautiful backgrounds for an instagram picture and we would never post something just to get a free stay.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

Both our families are involved in Motorsport and Bernies sons are both race drivers in Germany. So it is not a surprise that we met each other at the racetrack in Hockenheim 8 years ago. We immediately got friends and soon also best friends. Since 2022 we are also business partners

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

We had to learn that promising a hotel a review or posts can get you in trouble.

We were invited to a hotel and should make a post about it on our instagram page. When we got to the hotel we realized that it was in a very dangerous area and we were afraid to even walk the two meters from our car to the entrance. We anyway decided to stay in the hotel as we had promised and it was also too late to find new accommodation. We didn’t sleep the whole nicht due to loud music, party and cars hooting in the street. We felt very torn back and forth and didn’t know if we should make a post about the hotel as we promised or not. In the end we only did a post about the famous street it was situated in and warned the people about the area. We agreed that we would never recommend a place that we didn’t like ourselves or that we consider of being unsafe. Since then we put a clause in our contract with hotels.

Contact Info:

• Website: travelbuddieslifestyle.com
• Instagram: travelbuddies_lifestyle
• Facebook: TravelbuddiesLifestyle