Letting go of the everyday life and running off to explore the world with your loved one is a dream many harbour. However, most of us abandon the dream as we let the ways of the world dictate how we spend our daily lives. Not Savi and Vid, the travel influencer couple who go by the name Bruised Passports. The husband-wife duo followed up on their dream to explore the world and made travelling their profession. Travelling for 13 years now, it was in 2015 that the couple decided to leave their day jobs in the UK and pursue their blog, Bruised Passports, as a full-time career. Having visited over 80 countries till date, these digital entrepreneurs continue to drop pins across the world map with gusto. With romantic travel at the heart of their stories, we get talking to the power couple on their experiences and top rules of travelling with your partner.
We have a soft spot for offbeat and romantic travel, luxury accommodation, scenic places, local culture, and fine dining. We love exploring a country in our own unique way. There’s nothing we love more than meandering down forgotten alleys, spending hours in crumbling buildings, sampling local delicacies, making friends with locals or looking for experiential tours that brings us closer to understanding the rhythm of a new country.
It’s been fulfilling and challenging at the same time! It’s also been a steep learning curve. We learnt that building an online business takes much more effort than we thought. Sustaining it takes even more motivation, discipline, and effort. Bruised Passports is five years old and we work longer hours than we used to in our jobs. But to see Bruised Passports grow, to see people travel independently, and to have a virtual family is an exhilarating feeling! It is also terribly empowering to be able to work from anywhere in the world. So, it’s been an incredible experience, one we wouldn’t trade for the world!
That’s so true. This makes it harder but more important to draw boundaries. We do this by taking frequent social media detoxes and long stretches of ‘working’ breaks where we don’t photograph destinations and concentrate on the more pedantic side of work — SEO, writing articles, penning guides, etc. We also find working with offline projects to do with kids’ education and gender equality terribly therapeutic.
Absolutely. We’ve known each for way too long (20 years and counting) and are ideologically compatible, so the transition was pretty seamless. But the key to that lies in giving each other lots of space. We travel together but frequently take time off to pursue individual hobbies and passions. For instance — Vid goes hunting for specialty cafes in a new city while I go looking for museums and bookshops.
Savi on Vid: He is the most restless person I know, but when it comes to photographing sunsets, taking time lapses, or getting that perfect shot, he has the patience of a saint. It’s pretty amazing what passion can do!
Vid on Savi: I always knew Savi is a perfectionist but travelling together has made me admire her discipline more! She makes sure she does each thing to the best of her ability, even when we are juggling a hundred things at once and living out of suitcases. Compromise isn’t a word in her dictionary.
What is traditionally considered romantic might not work for someone — it’s important to tailor holidays according to personal preference rather than clichéd checklists fed to travellers by a guidebook or even social media!
Make sure you plan your itinerary trying to keep each partner’s individual tastes in mind. This might give you a new appreciation for your partner’s hobbies. For instance — Vid’s love for gourmet coffee has made me a fan of good coffee!
Finnish Lapland. The feeling of lying in a transparent glass igloo and looking out at the Northern Lights is incomparable. A trip to Lapland offers so many bucket list items — riding a reindeer, sledging with husky dogs, seeing the Northern Lights, cruising through a frozen sea, swimming with icebergs — and for that reason, it is second to none!
In terms of consumer preferences, more and more people are opting for experiential holidays instead of pre-packaged tours, which we feel is a step in the right direction. It is so much more fun to live in a vineyard in Tuscany for a week and really relish the pace of life there than tick off five different Italian cities in a week just for the heck of it!
Travel has gone digital and believe it or not unto 85 percent of travel decisions are made on social media. This is amazing, but for this reason, we would love it if content creators could be a bit more responsible in educating their readers about little things like littering historical sites, using plastic bottles, spreading education by volunteering at local schools — things that can make a world of a difference.
The plan is not to have a plan. We quit our corporate jobs in London to be able to experiment with a different way of living life. For this reason, we don’t want to jump into another rat race of bigger numbers, larger following etc. Instead, at each stage we want to concentrate on producing high-quality content we are proud of and living a truly content life.
All images: Courtesy Bruised Passports
An innate love for travel and food has translated into many a trips since childhood for Megha; it also fed her curiosity to know about local cultures. When not writing, she is on the lookout for three things: A great dark chocolate dessert, a beautiful pool where she can practice her backstroke, and art that she can save up for.
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