Thanks for visiting LiveShareTravel – an award-winning luxury travel blog by Sarah & Terry Lee and our small team. It’s all about inspiring your next trip and helping you to liberate luxury travel.
Liberating luxury points to our philosophy around travel. We believe that a stylish getaway doesn’t have to come with an unearthly price tag. We know that the luxury travel experience is about much more than the number of stars a hotel has, or the thread count of the sheets on your bed.
Luxury travel for us is about authenticity – it’s a gateway to new or diverse travel experiences. It affords us access to unique or unusual encounters with people and places all over the world. So we enjoy travelling in luxury but rarely do we travel only for luxury – unless perhaps, we’re heading off for a spa break where, you know, pampering rightly tops the agenda.
But one thing we realised when we started this site in 2010, and later, when we wrote a guide to affordable luxury travel, is that we enjoy helping our readers travel the world without it costing them a fortune – liberating luxury on every trip.
As part of that, we regularly share a selection of luxury travel deals. These, like our fantastic competitions, are shared first with our email subscribers. Sign up here and you will also receive a free eBook with our best strategy to help you to save money on every holiday.
What will you find on this luxury travel blog?
We bring you stories of our travels all over the world. Here you’ll find narrative tales of our adventures to inspire your own – some of our favourites relate to when we meet local people, like this one in Koh Samui, Thailand.
To choose from a variety of destinations that match your travel style check our Inspiration Gateway or a selection of list posts of the best places to go, around things like destinations for wine lovers, the best spa treatments around the world, plus Instagrammable views of landmarks. If it’s facts on your next destination that you’re looking for, we have a selection of detailed travel guides to countless countries and regions, plus a variety of city breaks.
Less of a reader and more of a visual person? We also share travel videos on our trips – some of them vlog style guides, others are visual stories where we revel in the rich texture of a place, and we hope you enjoy doing so too.
Then there are our stories on cruise holidays – from ships to tips especially aimed at the first time cruiser, and then in partnership with international holiday exchange company, RCI, we have a number of tips and guides on shared ownership holidays.
But who are we?
LiveShareTravel is our baby, which we started soon after we were made redundant just as the world was in the grips of the economic crisis. We have always loved travelling and would regularly take five or six holidays a year through careful planning around our office jobs. This included our destination wedding in Thailand 12 years ago – we can highly recommend getting married abroad. Want some ideas? Feel free to contact us – we absolutely love talking weddings!
Sarah has been a journalist and editor for more years than she cares to admit to (yes, that’s what happens when you get over… “ahem”, ok, ok – over 40) and her last staff job was as managing editor of three consumer and B2B travel magazines. Terry meanwhile worked in communications in local government.
Next up we have Lorraine, who joined us a few years ago, writing features and hosting our twice-monthly Luxe List where she runs down the latest luxury travel deals and tips live on our Facebook page.
We’re based in the UK but as luxury travel bloggers we go all over the world and sometimes have some very unusual experiences, others are downright bizarre. Here are a few photos charting just some of our adventures from dress up in North America to glamming it up in historic luxury surrounds in Asia and hitting the heady heights of the alps here in Europe. But you can also find stories on the blog from Africa – including our delicious wine trip to Stellenbosch, and South America – including Terry’s wild adventures in the Galapagos Islands and the cloud forests of Ecuador.
You’re reading a multi award-winning UK luxury travel blog
We’re constantly thrilled and delighted to win the recognition of the travel industry and our peers (well, kind of – we work hard to deliver great stories, videos and more – but you know, we’re always a bit blushing and British about it).
We’ve won awards for our writing, for producing innovative content, and also for great travel project concepts we’ve delivered here on LiveShareTravel and through Captivate and iambassador – two blogger/influencer networks we are directors of.
Our blogging awards
We’re super proud of all our awards, but as an acknowledgement of the quality of writing on LiveShareTravel, and our creative talents, we were really pleased to win the Caribbean Tourism Organisation Award in 2013, for our story on swimming with turtles in St Vincent and the Grenadines. This was one of Sarah’s favourite travel experiences ever. There is something so serene and yet magical about swimming with turtles – be sure to read to story to get a feel for it.
Photo courtesy of CaribDirect.com
Then in 2018, Terry followed that up with a runners-up award in the same category for this story from our trip to Antigua.
Creative and innovative projects
In 2017 we won the Visit USA Media Award for Digital Influencer for organising and producing #DriveUS1 our great US road trip project. Highlighting a trip of over 4,000 kilometres, it saw travel writer, Ella Buchan, travel for us from the most northerly point in Maine – the town of Fort Kent, all the way down US Route 1 to Key West, Florida.
This project also won a runners-up award in the Travel Marketing Awards in 2018. But this wasn’t our first award recognising the innovative projects we’ve created.
In 2015 we won the Travel Media Award for Innovative Content and Campaign for the #LoveSabah project, which highlighted Sabah in Borneo as a destination for weddings and honeymoons. It was so successful it also claimed runners-up in the Best Content category of the Travel Marketing Awards in 2016.
Projects like these, and affiliate links that we have on some stories on our site (if you click these links we are paid a small commission, at no cost to you) allow us to continue to bring you great stories and useful travel tips. Read the disclosure section of our terms of use to find out more.
Want to know more about working with us, our group projects, or the influencer networks Captivate and iambassador? Contact us here.
Want to hear more from us? We’re speakers too
In the scheme of things, we’ve been blogging a long time, and are considered among those at the forefront of professional blogging in Europe as a result of the work we’ve done, particularly through Captivate and iambassador.
As a result, we are regular speakers at conferences and trade shows, on all manner of subjects around travel, blogging and digital media – from telling compelling stories, to the changing world of travel media, and blogging as a business. We have spoken at the British Library (Sarah is sharing her knowledge there in the picture above), the Tourism Society; conferences and tradeshows like World Travel Market and Experience Latin America as well as for destinations like Visit Denmark, and travel brands in the UK and abroad.
Get in touch if you’re looking for someone to speak at your next event. And watch out for our own conference, helping to take intermediate travel bloggers to the next level – Propel will be held in Graz, Austria, in May 2019.