Joe Cheung discusses Hosted Media Previews with Leslie Harvey of Trips with Tykes on this episode of the Saverocity Observation Deck. 

https://soundcloud.com/asthejoeflies/episode-58

A few highlights:

Leslie talks about how Trips with Tykes came about, and her style of travel hacking. She offers insight on flying Frontier as well–interestingly enough my folks flew Frontier a few years ago and found it to be nice too!

She also wrote an interesting post about hosted media trips that I found pretty interesting. Joe also shared his thoughts about Blogger Bias.

Apparently disclosure laws were updated in 2009 or so to account for Blogging and Social Media. Laws and guidelines continue to evolve as new methods come about. The FTC is the regulator.

I was also interested to learn that “Mom Bloggers” were a place where this got noticed early on. I know the resident Saverocity Mom Blogger was the person that opened my eyes to the “Mom Blogger” space.

Interestingly, Leslie mentions that some in the Travel / Miles and Points Blogging space also skirt some of these disclosure rules. I think Dia highlighted this one too (can you tell she’s my resource?)

I think its important to know also that some of these hosted media previews do require bloggers to pay–or at least Leslie and Joe have paid. I think that is important because, it shows that, as Leslie says: “they are willing to put their money where their mouth is.”

Overall, this is a space I know very little about. I haven’t figured out how to get “hosted” or “sponsored” myself, obviously Disney wouldn’t be the ideal scenario for me, but I haven’t even figured out how to do that for my 2-3 weekend rentals from National Rental Car per month… I may just not have it in me for this type of gig, but I definitely do see some value in it, if balanced properly.

What were your thoughts on Hosted Media Previews?