The Thrifty Traveler Podcast was built on a simple belief: travel advice should not feel exclusive, overly technical, or driven by industry hype. Points, miles, and airfare are often presented as systems that only reward the most obsessive travelers. The podcast extends Thrifty Traveler’s long-standing editorial approach into an audio format designed to make these topics even more accessible.
Our goal was to create a show that makes complex travel strategies clear, practical, and genuinely useful to everyday travelers. Rather than leaning into aspirational luxury or insider culture, the podcast focuses on real-world decisions. How do you find cheaper flights? When does loyalty actually make sense? How can travelers avoid expensive mistakes?
Trust is central to the show. Hosted by journalists Gunnar Olson and Kyle Potter, the podcast prioritizes independence, direct analysis, and an intentionally conversational tone. Their humor, candor, and natural back-and-forth keep the show approachable and entertaining without diluting the substance. In a space crowded with promotional content and brand-driven messaging, the hosts openly critique airlines, credit cards, loyalty programs, and booking strategies based solely on what benefits travelers.
Listeners are not treated as industry insiders or rewards hobbyists, but as people trying to travel smarter and spend less.
At its core, The Thrifty Traveler Podcast aims to make travel more accessible, more transparent, and more achievable.
The Thrifty Traveler Podcast began as a low-stakes experiment. Our CEO noticed that editors Gunnar Olson and Kyle Potter had office debates during coffee breaks that were more entertaining than most scripted travel advice, and he suggested they mic themselves up to see if a broader audience found their chemistry as interesting as he did. It turns out he was right.
Launching in the 2025–2026 climate typically requires a celebrity host or a massive ad spend, but we had neither. We started in March 2025 in a dark coworking conference room with a sheet tacked to the wall and some basic microphones. Because Gunnar and Kyle are full-time flight analysts, writers, and editors, the podcast started off as just a fun "side project".
Despite the scrappy setup, the show resonated immediately. Between March and September 2025, we grew from zero to 25,000 monthly audio listeners and 8,000 monthly YouTube views without any paid acquisition. In October 2025, we brought on an editor and producer to professionalize our video editing and audio quality. Within 90 days of that investment, the show doubled again to 50,000 monthly audio listens and 20,000 monthly YouTube views.
Our biggest creative challenge remains navigating the "Nerd-to-Newbie" spectrum. Points and miles are notoriously dense, and because our hosts are deep-subject experts, we face a constant tension between keeping the "pros" engaged and making the content accessible to casual travelers. We solve this by treating every episode like a newsroom feature story: we lead with why the topic matters to your wallet and save the technical deep-dives for the middle.
This commitment to the audience also means navigating a travel industry filled with PR-driven guests and affiliate kickbacks. Our biggest constraint is our refusal to take the easy bait; we remain aggressively selective about our partnerships to keep our "BS detector" intact. We didn't try to reinvent travel podcasting—we just built a show that honestly tries to help people travel more for less in an approachable way.
We launched The Thrifty Traveler Podcast to see if our newsroom's internal debates could translate into a loyal audio community. The results didn't just meet our expectations; they completely reset them. Within our first year, organic growth propelled us to #2 on the Apple Podcast Travel charts, briefly overtaking industry icons like Rick Steves. We scaled from zero to 50,000 monthly audio listens and 20,000 monthly YouTube views without spending a dollar on acquisition. Perhaps most telling is our 80% completion rate on hour-long episodes and our 4.9-star rating, which confirm that listeners are sticking around for the substance, not just the headlines.
But for us, the real win is the tangible impact on our audience's lives. We define success by the stories we receive every week from travelers who used our analysis to book trips they thought were out of reach. One listener, Amy, heard our segment on Yellowknife and booked a solo trip to see the Northern Lights using just 12,500 points within 48 hours of the episode airing.
Seeing our audience transition from passive listeners to active participants—contributing "wins" and recording travel clips for our show intros—is the ultimate validation for us. This momentum has led to our first live show, currently in development for June 2026. We’ve proven that there is a massive hunger for a travel show that values blunt honesty and actionable expertise over traditional PR fluff.
