Thank you to Talia Lakritz from INSIDER for interviewing me. This article went on Business Insider on Nov. 29, 2016, 4:12 PM. As of today, December 5, 2016 is has 59,700!
The INSIDER Summary:
• Lisa Niver was a teacher before quitting her job to work on a cruise ship.
• She’s since been to 95 countries, founded We Said Go Travel, and wrote a travel memoir.
• She believes a traveler’s attitude and outlook shape their experiences, and that staying positive is key.
Traveling hasn’t always been easy for Lisa Niver. You wouldn’t know it from watching her 600+ videos and reading her insights on We Said Go Travel, but she’s had to overcome vision problems and her biggest fear in order to have some of her best adventures.
Through her work as a teacher, she found that a positive outlook and a can-do attitude could take her more places than she imagined — 95 countries, to be exact.
Lisa Niver’s love of travel began at an early age.
Her parents took her on a cruise to the Mediterranean, and she spent her junior year of high school abroad in Israel.
After dropping out of medical school, she taught preschool, then worked as a ski instructor at Club Med, where she met cruise ship employees on their vacation.
She decided to become one of them, and ended up working on cruise ships for almost seven years.
“I loved being on a cruise ship,” she said. “I explained to people it’s like living in a college dorm but no one has any homework.”
When Renaissance Cruises went bankrupt, she opted for low-budget travel, backpacking through Southeast Asia for 11 months.
Niver then returned to teaching, traveling when she could and sharing her experiences with her students.
“There’s so much about traveling that people want to share,” she said. “They enjoy having the experience, but they want other people to know about it. One of the best things I started to do when I was in the classroom was share my travels with my students.”
She told her students about gers she saw in Mongolia, and months later they recalled the round structures in a unit about architecture.
“I definitely found that the students were enthralled,” she said.
As a writer, speaker, and self-described “social media ninja,” Niver curates We Said Go Travel with content from 1,600 travel writers in 75 countries.
She also co-authored a memoir called Traveling in Sin.
When one of her fifth graders taught her how to use iMovie during recess, she began making travel videos, too.
She now has over 610 videos on her YouTube channel, as well as channels on Roku and Amazon Fire TV.
“For me, the connection between teaching and traveling has been mostly about the sharing,” she said.
Traveling has come with its fair share of challenges for Niver, but that hasn’t stopped her from visiting 95 countries.
She has intermittent esotropia, a condition that impairs her vision and makes it difficult to navigate unfamiliar places.
“There’s a lot of choices I’ve made traveling over the years, where I travel with a group, like on a cruise ship, or in a certain pattern, which, looking back, is the only way I could accommodate [the esotropia],” she said.
“That’s been a huge thing to overcome,” she said. “Getting lost and being a traveler is not that great a combination, but I kept going.”
A year of vision therapy also helped improve her vision.
And though she is terrified of drowning, she conquered her fear and learned to scuba dive.
“It’s one of my most favorite things, but I had a very hard time getting certified to scuba dive because there was a lot of getting certified that reminded me of drowning,” she said.
She’s seen how a mindset can shape one’s experience both in and out of the classroom and continues to propel herself forward into new adventures.
“If I was having a bad day or if I was really tired, the energy in the room would be different because they feed off of the way the teacher sets the environment,” she said. “That’s something I’ve noticed with travelers and for myself traveling.”
“One of the main things I’ve learned over the years is if you’re open to it working out, it will,” she said. “You find what you’re looking for.”
Lisa Ellen Niver
Lisa Ellen Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 101 countries and six continents. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she worked on cruise ships for seven years and backpacked for three years in Asia. She is the founder of the website WeSaidGoTravel which is read in 235 countries and was named #3 on Rise Global’s top 1,000 Travel Blogs.
With more than 150,000 followers across social media, she has hosted Facebook Live for USA Today 10best, is verified on Twitter and listed on IMDb, and is the Social Media Manager for the Los Angeles Press Club.
You can find Lisa Niver talking travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, Satellite Media Tours, The Jet Set TV and Orbitz travel webisodes as well as her YouTube channel, where her WeSaidGoTravel videos have over 1.5 million views. After three months on TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts, she had over 500,000 (1/2 million) views.
As a journalist, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors and been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. She has been a judge for the Gracie Awards for the Alliance of Women in Media, and has run 15 travel competitions on her website, publishing over 2,500 writers and photographers from 75 countries.
For her print and digital stories as well as her television segments, she has been awarded three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards.
Niver has published more than 2000 articles, in more than three dozen magazines and journals
including National Geographic, Wired, Teen Vogue, HuffPost Personal, POPSUGAR, Ms. Magazine, Luxury Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Club, Saturday Evening Post, AARP, AAA Explorer Magazine, American Airways, Delta Sky, enRoute (Air Canada), Hemispheres, Jewish Journal, Myanmar Times, BuzzFeed, Robb Report, Scuba Diver Life, Ski Utah, Trivago, Undomesticated, USA Today, TODAY, Wharton Magazine, and Yahoo.
Awards
National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards
2021 Winner: Book Critic: Ms. Magazine “Untamed: Brave Means Living From the Inside Out”
2019 Winner: Soft News Feature for Film/TV: KTLA TV “Oscars Countdown to Gold with Lisa Niver”
2019 Finalist for: Soft News, Business/Music/Tech/Art
Southern California Journalism Awards
2021 Winner: Technology Reporting
2021 Finalist: Book Criticism
2020 Winner: Print Magazine Feature: Hemispheres Magazine, “Painter by the Numbers, Rembrandt”
2020 Finalist: Online Journalist of the Year, Activism Journalism, Educational Reporting, Broadcast Lifestyle Feature
2019 Finalist: Broadcast Television Lifestyle Segment for “Ogden Ski Getaway”
2018 Finalist: Science/Technology Reporting, Travel Reporting, Personality Profile
2017 Winner: Print Column “A Journey to Freedom over Three Passovers”