Today we’d like to introduce you to Courtney & Nick.
Hi Courtney & Nick, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Nick had never been out of the country before he met me. Six weeks into dating we went to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve, and after that I decided he needed a passport so he could come to the UK with me. Three months into our relationship we were on a trip for two weeks, which probably tells you everything about how we operate.
The moment that turned him into a traveler was the one he didn’t want. I had booked us a day trip from London to Edinburgh and he told me, very clearly, that he had no interest in going. I told him it was already booked and we were going anyway. It ended up being his favorite part of the trip, and I still bring that up whenever he questions one of my plans. It was early 2020, so we came home right as the world shut down, and somehow that didn’t scare him off either. A few years later we went back to Scotland and got married in a castle, so I’d say the day trip worked out.
We travel as two completely different people, which is most of the fun. I’m the one with the itinerary and the bucket list, and Nick is the one who wants to know what happened in a building three hundred years ago and where the best meal within walking distance is. Somewhere between those two instincts we found the trips we actually love.
The business started on an ordinary weekday at home. Nick was working upstairs and I was at our kitchen table, and I ran up the stairs to ask what he thought about starting a blog for our family and friends, somewhere we could share how we plan our trips, how we pull them off once we’re there, how we find the experiences most people walk past, and all the ridiculous stories that come out of traveling together. I had already looked up domains, and Passport Partners was available, which felt like enough of a sign to just go for it — and now we are passportpartnerstravel.com.
We built our blog, started showing up on social media, and found an entire community of people who travel the way we do. We’ve been building on that ever since, sharing how we stay boujee on a budget, how we do the PTO math because we refuse to leave vacation days on the table at the end of the year, and how we review things honestly. If a place isn’t worth your money, we’ll tell you to skip it. We’re here to help other couples have as good a time as we do.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Nobody tells you that starting a travel business involves this many spreadsheets. People assume the hardest part is the travel, and the travel is the easy part. The hard part is everything that happens in the months that we are home, working full-time jobs and building this in the early mornings, the evenings, and most of our weekends.
Thankfully Nick is a wizard in Excel. He builds the systems and I fill them with chaos, and without his shortcuts the whole thing would be held together with tape and good intentions. He also quietly handles a huge amount of the unglamorous work that nobody sees on the other end, and this would fall apart without him.
The rest has been a learning curve more than a struggle. There were long stretches where we had no idea what we were doing or what format anything was supposed to be in. I love learning new tools and I read constantly about where things are heading, so most of that has genuinely been fun for me. The paperwork side is not glamorous and never will be, but we’re figuring it out together, and there’s something to be said for building a thing with the person you’re building a life with.
Then there are the obstacles nobody can plan for. Two days before we left for Iceland, somebody drove into the front of our house. Everyone was fine, thankfully, but it is not a scenario any packing list prepares you for. Travel rarely goes exactly to plan and neither does anything else, so we’ve gotten good at adjusting and moving forward.
The hardest part has been putting ourselves out there. Learning to be vulnerable on camera, to share the unfiltered version of a trip instead of the polished one, took real practice for both of us. What has kept us going is that we stayed ourselves and stayed honest the whole way through. I think that’s a big part of why we’ve made it as far as we have.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Our day jobs sound like they have nothing to do with each other. I work in marketing and communications for a nonprofit, and Nick works in finance for a global investment management firm. Between us we’ve got the storytelling side and the numbers side covered, an unfairly good setup for the thing we ended up building: itineraries, guides, and honest reviews for couples who travel around real jobs. He can tell you what a trip actually costs down to the dollar. I can tell you why it’s worth it.
Nick is the reason our trips are good. He plans every meal we eat and does most of the research on the tours we book, but the real thing he does can’t be planned. Nick is a people magnet. Locals walk up to him constantly to ask where we’re from and how long we’re in town, and those conversations turn into the recommendations we never would have found through online research or on Instagram. Half our best finds came from him talking to a stranger.
I traveled constantly in my early career, enough of it remote that I could work from wherever I landed, and I never shook the habit. The marketing work came along with it, and everything I learned there, the ads, the captions, the email sequences, the reporting, is what I build Passport Partners with.
What sets us apart is that we are boujee on a budget and we mean it. We’re a regular couple in Pittsburgh with a mortgage, student loans, and two full-time jobs. Nick gets fifteen days of paid time off a year, and since we travel together that fifteen is the real ceiling for both of us. This year it got us to Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy including Venice and the Dolomites, London, and the Bahamas, with Scotland still ahead of us. That isn’t a flex about money. It’s math, and solving that puzzle every year is the thing I’m proudest of.
There’s an assumption that international travel belongs to people with big bank accounts, and it isn’t true. International trips can be cheaper than most people think, especially out of Pittsburgh, where the flights are frequent and priced better than anyone expects. You just have to build travel around the life you already have instead of waiting for an easier one. And when we can’t get across an ocean, we’re still going somewhere. Weekend trips, midweek trips, whatever’s possible within a few hours of home.
Some of those we plan entirely around our boxer, Roman. One of our favorite weekends this year was a tiny cabin in the woods with a wall of windows looking straight out into the trees, a campfire, and a very happy dog. When he can’t come, he stays with his grandparents or his uncle and somehow still comes home more rested than we are. So when we put out a guide or an itinerary, it’s one that survived a real calendar, a real budget, and two people who had to be back at work on Monday.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
Neither of us had to think very hard about this, and it turns out both of our answers involve going somewhere.
Nick’s is Ocean City, Maryland, with his parents. He spent those days in the sand and in the ocean with them, and then the evenings walking the boardwalk, which is where the food comes in. Boardwalk fries, specifically. He can still talk about those fries.
Mine is a day my parents used to pull off every summer. My dad would have a rare day off and they’d wake my brother and me up early, load us into the car with snacks, and drive us up to the amusement park on the Erie peninsula. We’d spend the whole day going back and forth between the rides and the water park. Then in the evening we’d grab dinner and head across the street to the drive-in for a movie, and my brother and I would fall asleep in the back seat somewhere on the way home. It was a perfect day every single time, and knowing it was coming was almost as good as the day itself.
Looking back, that’s probably where all of this started for both of us. They’re both about making memories with the people you love most, and now we get to be the ones planning the trips.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://passportpartnerstravel.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passportpartnerstravel
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/passportpartnerstravel
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@passportpartnerstravel
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@passportpartners
