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

Maria Cariza , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I was working with and promoting a group travel service for over 7 years straight out of college. I absolutely LOVED it because I felt like I was living out my dream of traveling the world and not paying retail. To promote the service I started sharing my travels on Instagram and soon became the “travel friend.” Whenever my friends were going to a city, they’d always ask me what I recommend to help them in their vacation planning.

Well, 2020 happened and travel was the last thing the world was doing. So, that travel company filed for bankruptcy and I had to weigh out my options. Because I was so invested in that company, I went through the full 7 stages of grief. It’s all I had known since I was 20!

Thankfully, I knew I had options.

I had built up a love and a skill for a few things: social media content creation, trip planning, and education. I started to take on freelance social media management clients and decided to take pursing being a social media content creator seriously. While all of this was happening, I was on my own personal debt-free journey.

I know, all of this sounds super random, but I promise it all comes together.

Once I paid off all my debt, I went from a 560 credit score to a 760 credit score. One of my main motivators to do so is to start travel hacking. Travel hacking is paying for travel not with your own money, but through travel points you earn through credit cards. I missed traveling and saving on travel SO much y’all. Because I had built up financial discipline during my debt free journey, I decided to celebrate by applying to one of the most premium travel hacking credit cards: the American Express Platinum Card.

With this credit card, not only was I able to travel comfortably with airport lounge access, hotel upgrade perks, and pay $12 for flights that were $100+, but I finally had more travel content to share with my audience that followed me for travel insight in the first place!

Everything all comes together in Fall 2021 when I’m about to get married. My fiance (now husband) and I had accumulated over 260,000 travel points through credit cards to spend on our honeymoon. Because we travel hacked and paid for our trip with those points, we only paid $5,000 for our $15,000 honeymoon!

We were able to honeymoon at THE Ventana Big Sur, a luxury all-inclusive adults only resort in Big Sur, California. Base rooms here start at $2,000/night. We used points to book our resort stay for $0 out of pocket. When we arrived at the property, the had upgraded us to one of the $4,000/night suites!! The suite had a private hot tub on our patio and even a fireplace where we made s’mores together. When we checked out, we only paid for tips, service charges, and taxes which came out to $174. That’s it!!

There’s absolutely no way that we would be able to stay at the Ventana Big Sur if it wasn’t for travel hacking. One night there is a generous mortgage payment.

Because I was sharing how much we saved on our honeymoon and people kept asking for more information,I created a honeymoon planning and hacking course called ‘Dream Honeymoon Roadmap’. I combined all of my vacation planning knowledge from when I was partnered with my former travel company and my recent travel hacking experience to help brides-to-be have the honeymoon of their dreams.

It’s awesome because for people who may not be getting married or are 10 years into marriage, they can still take the ‘Dream Honeymoon Roadmap’ course and learn how to travel hack, too!

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

What are you most proud of and what are the main things you want potential clients/followers/fans to know about you/your brand/your work/ etc.

There was one polarizing truth that I learned while learning in the travel industry: most people believe they can’t afford to travel. That breaks my heart because traveling is one of the highlights of my life.

Traveling is a privilege. But I’m here to show people how they can travel in luxury on their current budget.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Myself and my team always have 1 thing in mind: what value can we bring to our audience? We’ll ask ‘Is this just a nice photo with no substance?’ ‘Are we teaching them anything useful?’ ‘Are they getting to know more about our brand and services through this?’

These are the same questions that I would ask myself when planning out a social media strategy for my former social media management clients.

Also, prioritize building relationships with your audience, too! On Instagram and YouTube, in particular, we do our best to reply to as many comments and DMs as possible. We’ll even hop on to our audience’s profiles, reply to their stories and posts because we want to get to know them even more.

The more that you build up an audience that genuinely values you/your brand and what they get from you, the more they’ll spread the word about your brand/company.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Recruiting and finding a good fit for your company is CRUCIAL. Following Maria has gone through our fair share of contractors and freelancers. There are a few that have stuck with us long-term and have made a HUGE impact in there time with us.

What I’ve learned that are very important for anyone that works with our brand are:
1) The person is the priority. We want work to be part of your life and not your whole life. Our team has gotten really good at fulfilling their projects and goals, while also not glorifying working at 100% capacity at all times.
2)Being excited about being creative! We’re in social media where everything is experiencial and things are constantly changing. We have to adapt our content to these growing platforms to be captivating and educational all the time. It’s exhausting if creativity and content creation isn’t already something you look forward to.
3) Since our brand is still stretching and growing, it’s important for us to do the same! Experimenting and learning from experts is something we value and will spend a considerable amount of time investing in.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.followingmaria.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/followingmaria
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/IFollowMaria
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@followingmariaa