Rapid Travel Chai

BoardingArea has launched multi-author blog TravelUpdate with an Ultimate Gadget Giveaway running to August 5, 2016. Prizes include iPads and Bose headphones, so enter if you are interested.

The idea of TravelUpdate is a place for new voices to be heard. Posts will be staggered throughout the day so not the flood of same-topic posts when a deal breaks.

We all get into our routine and media bubbles so I periodically try to expand my reading list to see what is new, so I will check it out.

There are misconceptions about BoardingArea. There is even a FlyerTalk forum dedicated to speculation about it and other miles and points blogs. Some quick points:

• BoardingArea was founded by Randy Petersen, who also founded FlyerTalk, InsideFlyer, Freddie Awards, MilePoint, etc, etc. Take the time to read any of many interviews of him found online.
• BoardingArea provides the back-end for this and other blogs. This way, when there are tech problems, I have someone other than myself to blame.
• BoardingArea is not involved with editorial content. This way, when you fault my content, I have no one else to blame. BoardingArea maintains a strict anti-plagiarism policy.
• BoardingArea generally handles the banner advertising you see on its blogs, though affiliate relationships such as text links to credit card offers are handled by specific bloggers and any support or critique you have of those affiliate relationships should be to specific blogs, not BoardingArea or other blogs.
• BoardingArea now has blogs in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. No one can understand the Brits, and they haven’t agreed on a category to link, but there are several. Separate from them are the Europeans. There are Canadian blogs, which you can tell because of British spelling and 25k credit card offers are a big deal, and an India-focused blog.

There are now many flavors of BoardingArea:

• BoardingArea.com, the original and largest site, generally housing the most established and/or highest traffic blogs.
• Prior2Boarding, as number of blogs increased, and content posting accelerated on some blogs to as much as 5-8 posts/day, one site was unwieldy. Prior2Boarding is a parallel to BoardingArea, focusing on up-and-coming blogs.
• TravelUpdate, just launched, is multi-author on one page, rather than individual blogs. This provides a platform to authors that will post several times a week rather high frequency. (For those with sharp memories, this is a re-launch of the prior single-author blog of the same name.)
• InsideFlyer, the former print magazine is now online, is also multi-author, and does retain an editorial function as well as the extensive magazine archives.

How to keep up with all this?

Each site has the range of subscription and social media options. Some readers like to browse the site homepages or the all content social media feeds.

I prefer to subscribe to individual blog newsletters and RSS feeds so I can keep straight who is who and manage the content flow among those more and less relevant to my taste.