About me
My name is Kashyap Bhattacharya but you can call me Kash. It is an easy name to remember for some reason 🙂
I started the BudgetTraveller 15 years ago as an experiment. I wanted to have a place where I could share some of my travel stories and also the travel tips that my friends loved. I’ve been travelling on a budget for as long as I have been travelling. In 1999, I took my first trip to Ireland and caught the travel bug. Since I was studying as an international student in Scotland and paying silly amounts in tuition fees, I had little or no money so I was always keen to find hacks, ways of travelling for as little as possible. This blog is where I share all of those tips, tricks learnt through the years.
This blog is also a form of therapy. I had just lost my job that summer ( 2009) and I found myself in 3 different jobs to make ends meet. In my spare time, late evenings or weekends, I found the next best thing to not travelling was writing about the stories. Reliving the memories. Remembering the people I met.
This blog is also how I make a living. After 3 years of building the site and running it as a hobby, I took the plunge in 2012 of leaving my day job and becoming a full time travel blogger. As with running any start up or being self employed, I’ve experienced my fair share of highs and lows which one day I’ll share on the blog. In terms of how I make a living from the blog, I am sometimes invited by tourism boards to write about their destination. In return I get paid a fee. I am fussy about which destination or brands to feature on the blog. I only choose destinations which I feel my readers would be interested in visiting. I also work with a few affiliates on the site like Hostelworld and Booking.com If a reader makes a purchase through these links, I earn a commission which is at no extra cost to my reader. These commissions help me reduce the ever-increasing costs of running this blog. I supplement my income as a freelance travel writer and my work has been featured by the New York Times, Guardian, Vanity Fair & National Geographic Traveller to name a few. I am also am a contributor for the UK based iPaper. I have also written a book about the amazing world of design, ‘luxury hostels’ -it is called ‘The Grand Hostels: Luxury Hostels of the World’ and published by Berlin based design publisher Gestalten.
I also work as a content expert for a destination marketing agency called Toposophy and am a consultant for the hostel industry -the freelance writing, the book and my consultancy supplements my blogging income and allows me to travel as digital nomad for the last 15 years.
Meet Sabrina!
Besides running the blog, my other passion in life is telling stories via video. Time for you to meet my travel/food/happiness/ life partner and videographer Sabrina Wulf. We have worked together for 7 years now on a variety of amazing projects and have a few awards to show for our work- Best Long Form Video at the Traverse Creator Awards 2024 for our storytelling project about Football Culture in Britain with Visit Britain’s Berlin office , the 2024 Travel Media Awards Travel Blogger/Vlogger of the Year for our storytelling project about Baja California Sur in partnership with HipTraveler plus also our South Moravia with Locals which won the Tourfilm 2022 International Film Festival award. (With more than 100 short domestic and foreign videos submitted every year, the TourFilm International Film Festival is the oldest festival of tourism films in the world that was setup to promote Czech Republic as a tourist destination )
So, if you are looking for a cool video to raise awareness of your brand -we can help!
Other stuff
I have 15+ years experiences of putting together innovative content ideas for clients, some of which have won major tourism marketing awards. Examples of recent projects include Locals Know it Best – a card game that challenges people to discover a city without their smartphone, just a deck of cards and locals. Partners for the project include Visit Malta, Basel Tourism and Vorarlberg Tourism. I also founded a storytelling project about cool, lesser known festivals. MustLoveFestivals.com with Expedia and also cofounder of the idea, BlogVille-first creators house concept back in 2012 for Emilia Romagna & #Blogmanay for Visit Scotland & Unique Events-winner of the Tourism Marketing Gold Award. I launched a campaign called AdoptaHostel.com in partnership with Stay the Night during the pandemic that helped to raise €100000 for hostels worldwide and when the war started in Ukraine, helped launch a directory-HospitalityforUkraine.com where with the help of 220 accommodation providers across 19 countries listed we managed to successfully house hundreds of refugees.
Always looking for interesting storytelling projects and brands to collaborate with. If this sounds like you, drop me a line and say hello: [email protected] or via LinkedIn or Instagram
