I went to college at University of Pennsylvania and for four years Philadelphia was my home. It definitely seemed very cold to me in the winter compared to Los Angeles but I loved living there. I made some lifetime friends and want to share some of the great things about this incredible city. I love exploring more of the historic area of the City of Brotherly Love. Benjamin Franklin was a founding father of our country and my University (1749)!
I also loved my tour at City Hall and the Mayor’s reception room. I spent the afternoon at Penn Museum or The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology which is an archaeology and anthropology museum that is part of the University of Pennsylvania and on Penn campus. I saw one of the recently renovated exhibits and the other exhibits will be renovated and open in 2020.
Lisa Niver in the Mayor’s Reception Hall at City Hall, Philadelphia
WHERE DID I STAY?
Loews Philadelphia Hotel
This historic building was the first modern skyscraper in America and is a National Historic Landmark. It was originally the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society (PSFS) building and has a bank vault in lobby. The custom designed Cartier clocks are still on every floor! Built in 1932, it had no dome or ornamentation. The steel construction with a T shaped tower allowed for more natural light and rentable space! This design allowed for the skylines of NYC and Chicago to happen. The PSFS is still on the side of the building.
WHERE DID I EAT?
Vernick Coffee Bar
James Beard award-winning Chef Greg Vernick partners with Four Seasons Hotel at Comcast Center to deliver a modern coffee bar with fantastic breakfast and lunch. The cafe is open to the public from 7am to 5pm. There is art in the lobby: Jenny Holzer’s digital art installation called, For Philadelphia, and Conrad Shawcross’s sculpture, Exploded Paradigm.
Thank you to everyone who participated in our
KTLA President’s Day Giveaway!
The winner will receive:
HOTEL
Two nights hotel accommodations at Loews Philadelphia Hotel (based on availability)
Hotel breakfast and parking daily
FLIGHTS:
Roundtrip, coach airline ticket Los Angeles/Philadelphia/Los Angeles from VISIT PHILADELPHIA.
Lisa Ellen Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 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. Niver is represented by Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary, Inc. Look for her memoir in Fall 2023 from Post Hill Press/Simon and Schuster.
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 1.7 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 and been a finalist twenty times.
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
2022 Finalist: Book Criticism
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”
Social Media Presence
YouTube Channel: We Said Go Travel (1.7 million views)
Short form video:TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts
Twitter: lisaniver (90,000 followers)
Instagram: lisaniver (24,000 followers)
Pinterest: We Said Go Travel (20,000 followers and over 70,000 monthly views)
Facebook: lisa.niver (5,000 followers); We Said Go Travel (3,000 followers)
LinkedIn: lisaellenniver (9000 contacts)
