Coronavirus: What It Means For Our Road Trip, Finances & More

It’s been three weeks since I last wrote about how coronavirus was affecting our road trip, so it’s time for another update.

In that last post I shared how it had affected what we had planned for March and April. My parents were due to visit from the UK for 6-7 weeks, joining us on the road trip as we checked out all of Utah’s National Parks, the Colorado Rockies, the Grand Canyon and more. We ended up cancelling that due to the pandemic, so Shae and I needed to find something else to do.

We found a great rate on a one bedroom suite at a hotel in Albuquerque, so we booked ourselves in there for 3.5 weeks. We’ve now been here for 2.5 weeks, so we have another week or so before we move on.

Needless to say, COVID-19 has affected our ongoing road trip plans, along with our income and other aspects of life. Here’s a rundown of how things have been changing and could change in the future.

Our Current Travel

We’ve done very little here in Albuquerque. Other than heading to the grocery store a couple of times, doing roadside pickup for a pair of hair clippers at Kohl’s and taking Truffles to dog parks (which other than a couple of times had zero other dogs or people), we’ve not gone anywhere.

That’s a shame as it seems like there’d be a bunch of fun things to do in and around Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but even if anything was open, it wouldn’t be responsible. Their state parks are closed, so we haven’t been able to go hiking there. It sounds like there might be other hiking trails here, but we’ve been wary about going hiking as we’d seen reports elsewhere that trails had been much more busy than normal, so it’s much harder to practice social distancing.

We’re hopefully going to have time to check out Petroglyph National Monument at some point in the next few days as that apparently has trails that are still open and hopefully won’t be busy.

Travel Cancellations

As mentioned earlier, we’re here for another week or so. We’d been holding off on booking anything else as we wanted to find out what hotel and Airbnb cancellation policies would be once April came around. Until a week or so ago, they were only allowing free cancellations up to a certain date, whereas we had a few reservations with check-in dates beyond that cutoff.

When my parents were originally due to visit, we’d happened to book a couple of nights in Albuquerque while driving through from Colorado to the Grand Canyon. Those two nights were due to start the day we checked out of our current hotel, so if we weren’t able to cancel that reservation then we’d have gone there for a couple of nights. That was thankfully unnecessary as the hotel ended up cancelling our stay as they’re temporarily closed.

Our next consideration was a week-long stay in Flagstaff for the Grand Canyon. Airbnb eventually updated their cancellation policy for stays beyond mid-April, so we were able to cancel that reservation with no penalty.

Shae had booked a couple of Airbnbs for my birthday at the end of this month. We were able to cancel those last night and get back a full credit to be used towards future Airbnb reservations, so we’re thankfully not out of pocket in any way due to these cancellations.

Our Future Travel Plans

Now that all our existing reservations were cancelled, it was time to work out where to go next. We didn’t want to have to travel too far, so we looked at our options for staying in New Mexico, along with the states surrounding it.

One of our options was to visit Colorado. We’d already planned to visit CO this summer, so in theory that made sense. I was a little apprehensive about visiting there right now though because news reports suggested Denver might be one of the next hotspots for coronavirus.

We had a few additional requirements for where we’d stay next:

1. Long-term stay – We wanted to stay in place for a month, so we needed somewhere we could book for that long.
2. Pet-friendly – We travel with our dog Truffles, so it needed to accept pets. That immediately ruled out a lot of hotels and Airbnbs.
3. At Least One Bedroom – With me working late at night and Shae often teaching online very early in the morning, we wanted to have a separate bedroom so that neither of us would be disturbed while sleeping when the other person was working. In normal times, working in a hotel lobby works fine for this. With social distancing though, it’s safer for everyone if we can stay contained in our own space. As a result, studio hotel suites or studio Airbnb apartments aren’t ideal. If booking an Airbnb, it also meant we’d want the place to ourselves rather than just renting a room.
4. Kitchen – We have a portable kitchen which enables us to make meals in hotel rooms. If we’re going to stay in one place for a month though, we want to have a proper kitchen to take advantage of.
5. Low pricing – Although we have a lot of hotel points, finding a hotel we could book that met all the above requirements and wasn’t too expensive points-wise would be hard to come by. We therefore wanted to make sure it wouldn’t be too expensive, something the above requirements made a little harder.

After spending many hours looking at all our different options, we settled on an Airbnb in Pueblo, CO. It’s a 2 bedroom apartment which is pet-friendly, has a full kitchen and is costing us just under $40 per night when taking into account the fact that we bought Airbnb gift cards at a discount. Although Pueblo has had confirmed cases of COVID-19, it’s hopefully not as prevalent as in Denver.

What We’ll Be Doing

In normal times, we like to go hiking, eat at local restaurants, visit breweries and wineries, check out museums, visit quirky roadside attractions, etc. Most of those activities aren’t going to be available for the next month, so that limits what we’ll be doing in Pueblo.

Ideally, I’d love for us to take advantage of all the hiking opportunities that Colorado has to offer. Although their state park campgrounds and buildings are closed, their state parks themselves are still open, as are their hiking trails. What I’m not sure about is how busy they are. Given Coloradans tend to be an outdoorsy bunch, I suspect hiking trails will be busy. If they are, we’ll have to give them a miss, but I’m hoping we’ll be able to find some kind of isolated hiking locations.

Our Blog Posts

You might have noticed that we haven’t been publishing blog posts as frequently as normal over the last few weeks. Although we (theoretically!) have more time on our hands right now due to not doing our normal travel-related activities, we’ve had much less to post about as a result.

With it likely being several months – at the very least – before our road trip gets back to normal, that got us thinking as to what we can post about here on No Home Just Roam. You can therefore expect to see some posts about behind-the-scenes stuff, hiking trails (hopefully), restaurant reviews (takeout obviously), virtual tours of places we’ve been on the road trip, maybe some travel throwbacks from past international trips before we started blogging, some more hotel room meal recipes, product reviews of items we’ve found useful on the road trip for the last couple of years and more.

Our Blog Traffic

If you read our stats for March 2020, you’ll have seen that visitors to this site dropped greatly in March. The first week of March wasn’t too bad, it declined more in the second week, with the final two weeks being even worse. Here’s a comparison of our website traffic in March 2020 versus March 2019:

That was a decrease of 41% year-on-year, but it’s clearly a greater drop than that during the second half of March. If we look solely at the last two weeks of March, it’s a 65% drop year-on-year.

April hasn’t started out any better, so our website traffic is likely to be down for the foreseeable future. That’s not surprising seeing as we’re a travel blog and people simply aren’t traveling right now. It’s obviously disappointing, but we’ll hopefully regain much of what we’ve lost in the future once people can safely start traveling again, whenever that might be.

Our Income

One thing you might be curious about is our income as a result of this. With a 65% drop in website visitors, does that mean our income has dropped by 65%?

Thankfully not.

No Home Just Roam hasn’t been a huge money maker so far, largely because of how we monetize it right now. Other than a few ads served by Google AdSense and Amazon affiliate links here and there, we haven’t put a huge focus on turning this into a big money spinner. I’m obviously hoping that over the long term we’re able to increase our revenue by creating different income streams, but that’s a longer term project.

Many travel bloggers support their travels by writing sponsored posts, but we’ve always committed to never doing that here to remain completely independent and so we can offer unbiased reviews – here’s more about the reasons why we don’t write sponsored posts. With the travel industry grinding to a halt, most travel bloggers making a living that way have suddenly found themselves without any source of income as no airlines, hotels, travel agencies or tourist boards are organizing trips.

A lot of sites in the points and miles space have recently lost their main source of income – credit card affiliate commissions. That’s something we’d also committed to not doing here on No Home Just Roam, so we’ve never relied on that kind of income.

In fact, we’re in the ridiculously fortunate position to have seen our income increase as a result of coronavirus. We know that most people aren’t so lucky right now, so we’re definitely aware of that and certainly aren’t trying to boast. We’ve had people asking about this though, so it’s something I wanted to address seeing as we try to be as transparent as possible. Transparency is one of the reasons we publish our stats each month which includes a breakdown of all our spending, as well as being able to show that full-time travel doesn’t have to be as expensive as you might think it would be.

So why has our income increased? A couple of reasons.

Teaching

With us not moving every 5-7 days and not going out doing any activities, we’ve had more time on our hands. Shae has been teaching online with VIPKid 2-3 mornings a week, while she’d also started teaching with Outschool in the last year.

Shae has been scheduling more and more classes now that she has more time to do so, now teaching ~30 hours a week. With schools closed around the world and Outschool being a global platform, the classes she’s running tend to have even more learners in them which means she makes more per class.

She prices her classes very competitively to make it as affordable for parents as possible which is one reason they’re becoming so busy. It does mean she doesn’t earn as much as she potentially could, but she’s able to reach more young people as a result and that’s more important right now seeing as we’re not actually reliant on that extra income.

Websites

Although this particular website has seen a significant drop in traffic over the past month, some of my other websites have seen an increase in traffic due to COVID-19.

I’ve shared in the past about the websites I’ve created in the past, so check out Here’s How We Can Afford To Travel Full-Time for more details about those. Three sites in particular have seen a decent increase in recent weeks.

The first is Scavenger Hunt, presumably because parents are searching online for fun activities for their kids to do at home. That site has loads of printable scavenger hunt lists which are free to download, so hopefully they’re proving to be useful, even though my design skills were sub-par when creating those print-offs! Scavenger Hunt saw a 36% increase in the last two weeks compared to the same two weeks last year.

While that’s not as large as the increase on the next two sites, I haven’t actually published any new scavenger hunts on there since January 2014, so the fact that it’s still going strong – and growing right now – is great.

Another site that’s seen an increase in visitors is Riddles For Kids. Similar to Scavenger Hunt, Riddles For Kids has presumably received a ton more visitors because of parents looking for things to entertain their children. The site has more than a thousand riddles that I wrote over the course of several years and they’re all free for parents to use.

Here’s a chart showing the visitor growth over the past two weeks.

As you can see, the year-on-year growth is much larger than Scavenger Hunt. In fact, Riddles For Kids saw a 101% increase in visitors during that time – that’s twice as many people visiting the site. It’s been three years since I last published any new riddles, so it’s satisfying to see it still growing.

The third site that’s seen a decent amount of growth is GC Galore (which stands for Gift Cards Galore). Rather than being aimed at young people, GC Galore lists every possible deal on gift cards I can find. Due to so many stores and restaurants being closed right now, quite a few of them are selling discounted gift cards to try to get some kind of income – even more so than normal.

Here’s how GC Galore traffic compares over the last month to this time last year.

That’s growth of 439% over the course of one year. That percentage growth is a little misleading as I was starting from a much lower base because the site was only a few months old in April 2019 (I’d launched it in December 2018). I was therefore still building readership at that point, but growth of 439% in a year is still pretty good.

With the economy in the tank at the moment, a lot of people are struggling financially. Buying discounted gift cards is a great way to save money on things you were going to buy anyway, so I think people looking for those kind of deals is part of the reason for the increase in traffic.

There are also a lot of people that buy discounted gift cards and resell them at break even cost or for a small profit. This is because they can also bank the credit card rewards earned when buying the gift cards. Some people do this at very large scale which increases the rewards, but needless to say that also increases their risk. With some retailers and restaurants likely going under in the coming weeks and months, I wouldn’t want to be left holding a ton of gift cards that are suddenly worthless, so be very careful if that’s something you’re interested in exploring.

Frequent Miler

In addition to all my different websites, I write 10 hours a week for Frequent Miler. My income from that hasn’t gone up recently, but I do have the peace of mind knowing that my income from that is secure for now.

Despite Frequent Miler having a huge drop in traffic in recent weeks and affiliate earnings disappearing overnight, Greg (the owner of Frequent Miler) has committed to keeping myself, Nick and Carrie on for the same number of hours and same rate of pay for at least the next six months. I knew he was a decent boss before that, but that’s been incredibly generous of him and is something we’re all grateful for.

Greg wrote a great post last week about how Frequent Miler will survive, so check out How Frequent Miler (the business) will survive COVID-19 for more about that.

Our Hopes & Predictions For The Future

Time to get back to No Home Just Roam stuff. With a 65% drop in traffic, we’re receiving far fewer page views than we had a few weeks ago. Despite that, I think that when things start getting back to “normal”, this website will be well-positioned to capitalize on that and will be in a stronger position than before. That’s because I think people’s travel habits will change in the near term, particularly in the next year or two.

At this point in time, I can’t see shutdowns and travel restrictions being widely lifted (well, not if they’re responsible) for at least two months, but likely much longer. There have also been suggestions that we could see a resurgence in cases of COVID-19 in the fall, so that’ll put people off travel for even longer.

Even when things start getting back to how they once were, I think many travelers will be apprehensive about flying anywhere until there’s a confirmed vaccine. That being the case, people will likely travel domestically, taking staycations or going on a road trip rather than flying.

With us being on a 50 state road trip, I imagine that kind of travel will appeal to more and more people. Our site will be able to give all those domestic travelers a lot of ideas of fun things to do in each state, from hiking to quirky roadside attractions to wineries to restaurants to hotels and more.

It’ll also be interesting to see what’ll happen with people working remotely. Although many people enjoy working in an office for the camaraderie, I’m sure many have appreciated not having to commute in recent weeks and will have enjoyed working from home. With many businesses discovering that they don’t necessarily need to have large, expensive offices, remote working will probably become even more common. If that’s the case, that’ll free up people to travel more. After all, that’s the reason we’re able to travel full-time – all we need is a decent internet connection and we can work from anywhere in the country, or the world! More people discovering this lifestyle will probably (well, hopefully) increase our readership with people that want to do something similar.

Final Thoughts

So that’s where we are. Shae, Truffles and I will be laying low until mid-May, at which point we’ll reevaluate what we’re up to next. Our income should be fairly secure for at least the next six months and hopefully beyond that too. We’re putting Shae’s extra earnings to one side right now as an additional rainy day fund simply because we don’t know how long this pandemic is going to go on for.

We count ourselves incredibly fortunate to be in the position we’re in, especially seeing as some of my websites are seeing strong growth as a result of the current circumstances, as are Shae’s online classes. No Home Just Roam hasn’t been a significant source of income yet which is why the drop in traffic hasn’t caused us financial hardship.

Questions

I’ve tried to be as thorough as possible about everything in this post, but let me know in the comments below if you have any questions about what I’ve written here or if there’s anything else you’d like to know about the trip.