Helen Hatzis, is the Chief Exploration Office and Co-Founder of Trip Jaunt.
Helen is a recipient of the Governor-General Award, has been honoured as one of Canada's Nicest People! A true xenophile at heart, she finds joy in traveling and delights in sharing her experiences through Trip Jaunt (formerly Weekend Jaunt), an online travel community and hub she established in 2010. Her aspiration is to inspire others to explore the world as she does!
Helen is an esteemed advisory member of the North American Travel Journalists Association.
Positano sits at the foot of steep cliffs that rise sharply from the sea, and above it runs a trail that locals have long called the Path of the Gods. Known in Italian as Sentiero degli Dei, this clifftop route has become one of the most direct ways for visitors to feel the scale and
As summer 2026 approaches, homeowners across the United States are encountering longer waits for air conditioning repairs. A combination of supply chain disruptions and a required shift in refrigerants has reduced the availability of key replacement parts. The result is extended timelines that can stretch from days into weeks, forcing difficult choices for those whose
Caroline English, director of social media at The Points Guy, booked a spring 2026 family trip to Disney World through Marriott using points last December. During checkout she selected trip interruption coverage without realizing it, paying a $12 premium. Months later, her young daughter fell ill shortly after the family landed in Florida, forcing them
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t go away with sleep. It builds quietly through meeting notifications, city traffic, and the ambient buzz of a device that never quite powers down. At some point, the body and mind start pulling in a different direction – toward open space, toward quiet, toward somewhere that asks
Tasmania doesn’t make a lot of noise about itself. It sits quietly below mainland Australia, separated by the Bass Strait, and yet it holds some of the most extraordinary wild land on the planet. You could fly over it on your way somewhere else and have no idea what you’d missed. For walkers, naturalists, and
There is a particular hour just after dawn in the backwaters of Kerala when the mist hasn’t fully lifted and nothing about the world seems to be in any particular hurry. A lone canoe cuts through a narrow canal. Coconut palms lean over the water. Somewhere behind a thatched wall, rice is being washed for
Most Americans assume a European mountain experience requires a transatlantic flight and a generous travel budget. The reality is a little more surprising. Scattered across the American landscape, from the Cascades of Washington to the Ozark hills of Arkansas, there are mountain towns that genuinely look, sound, and feel like corners of the Old World,
There’s a stretch of road in the Pacific Northwest that keeps showing up in travelers’ conversations, social media feeds, and road trip lists with unusual consistency. It’s not in California. It’s not the Blue Ridge Parkway. It’s Oregon’s Highway 101, threading 363 miles along one of the most dramatically untamed shorelines in the entire country.
Most people picture Waikiki when they think of Hawaii. The crowded beach strip, the towering hotels, the resort menus priced for people on vacation budgets they’ll regret in January. Oahu delivers on all of it, and for millions of visitors each year, that’s exactly the point. A smaller, quieter crowd has started making a different
Something shifted in the travel blogging world over the past couple of years. The usual circuit of Paris, Santorini, and the Croatian coast started giving way to somewhere less expected. A small Balkan country with Ottoman-era towns, crystalline coastlines, and daily costs that make Western Europe feel almost absurd by comparison began filling up social
There’s a stretch of road in northern Washington that does something unusual. It makes you forget where you were going in the first place. You pull off at a viewpoint for five minutes and find yourself still standing there forty minutes later, staring at turquoise water and jagged peaks that look more painted than real.
Key West has the name recognition, the bars, the T-shirts. It also has the crowds, the traffic, and the kind of pricing that makes you feel slightly punished for having good taste in travel. But Florida’s coastline is far longer and more interesting than most visitors ever discover. Florida’s best-kept secrets aren’t theme parks or