How to Win Travel Competitions & Get a Free Holiday!
If you know what to look for to win a free trip, and which ones to enter, you stand a much better chance of winning the thing. Here are my top tips for how to win travel competitions, and bag a free trip.
There are certain rules to winning holiday competitions, which I’ll go through below. There’s a knack.
I want to tell you how to win a travel competition, or at least, how I did.
Five times.
When I first started travel blogging, back in 2011, I’d do anything to travel more. I was earning £19k a year, living in London and going out every weekend. I didn’t have the money to spend on all the trips I wanted to go on, and I needed new material to write about.
How to win free trips
I decided to start entering free holiday competitions. Part of my job at the travel company I worked at was coming up with ideas for competitions to win holidays, and making them stand out so people wanted to enter them.
This meant that researching what other travel companies were doing for holiday comps was all in a day’s work. I needed to look at their methods of entry, what kind of holiday giveaways they were doing and who won them.
Every week I spent more time than I probably should of some time attempting to win the travel competitions I found. Well, seeing as I was already on the page I might as well.
And then I started winning holidays.
Travel competitions I’ve won
1. G Adventures trip from Zanzibar to Nairobi
It was some sort of anniversary for the Queen at the time, back in 2012, so the travel company G Adventures asked their Facebook audience to dress up as a King or Queen, send in a pic, and the winner would win the trip.
I dressed up as Martin Luther King, in a suit and ‘tasche, and only went on to win the blummin thing. Shame I can’t find the photo now, probably for the best.
I can vividly remember running on the treadmill at the gym at Swiss Cottage, thinking about how much I wanted the G Adventures trip. I remember saying to myself that if I won, I was really going to make a go of this travel blogging malarkey. And I did. So here I am, four years later and loving the travel blogger life.
And that trip to Zanzibar and Nairobi was awesome.
Winning travel competitions
- That trip was the first of a glorious winning streak for me. Over the next two years I went on to win:
- 2. – Trip for two to Sharm el Sheikh
- 3. – Two flights to Amsterdam
- 4. – Trip for two to Cuba
- 5. – £300 to spend on a trip to Rhodes
- 6. – A GoPro HERO4
I’ve just found a new site for all my travel competition wants, where it’s possible to win a holiday with Daymade by entering their weekly draws. Check it out!
Holiday competitions on my blog
I make it a point to show off competitions for travel on my blog. Why? Because it’s where I began.
There’s no way I would’ve been able to afford those holidays back in the day.
If I hadn’t have entered that first holiday competition to win the trip from Zanzibar to Nairobi, I wouldn’t have had the confidence in myself that I’d done something cool. Something cool enough to write about and to kick start my travel blog into action.