- I do single parent travel.
I've got some super helpful tips for just anybody who wants to travel because travel has been very healing for me in my widowhood grieving journey.
Hasport has always half full even when life sings half empty.
- Whitney O'Hallock is a resilient travel writer, author, entrepreneur, and the founder of the half full passport. Drawing from her journey through profound loss in single motherhood, she inspires others to pursue their dreams and create a life filled with purpose,
adventure, and meaningful memories.
“- What are your tips for the single parents travel?”
- Don't let anybody tell you not to. Don't tell anybody that you shouldn't because you're a single parent or your kid is too small because you're allowed to have memories even if your kids don't have memories of you.
- What's the hardest part about planning this from abroad and kind of setting up these tours? - So the hardest part is... - It spans the globe. Like a super high school internet Elvis.
(people speaking in foreign language) - The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy. (people speaking in foreign language) (people speaking in foreign language)
- You can live your dreams. - Hey, welcome back everyone through another episode of Living Your Legacy Podcast. I'm your host again, Jay Sangen. We're here at the brand new studios in South Beach, Miami.
It's a beautiful day, sunny, and we've got a great guest with us here from entrepreneurs. What's your name, where are you from, and what's your business? - My name's Whitney O'Hallick, and I live in the DC area, and I have three businesses, very busy lady.
I have a blog called The Half Full Passport that is geared towards single parent travel. I have a Christian tour company in the Middle East called Elevation Journeys, and I'm also building a Dahabaya, which is a Nile cruise ship called the Nathiria,
and that is happening in Egypt. - Wow, a Dahabaya. - Dahabaya. - Dahabaya. - Dahabaya.
- What's up, what's up?
“- It's the Egyptian word for, I think it means golden.”
Technically, but it's a traditional Nile cruise ship. So you know, they've got the gigantic cruise ships that go up and down the Nile between as one and Luxor, and then they have the smaller ones, they're more luxury, you know,
geared toward luxury travel. And so that's what we do. - Wow, so you're juggling three companies, right? And you're juggling how many kids? - One to your old.
- One to your old one. - Yeah. - Okay, so you got three businesses in the sand, you got one to your old to this sand. - She's more on my hip.
- I mean, these are kind of crazy business. How do you get into the all this stuff? - So I love travel. - I've been a travel writer now for around 20 years. - Okay.
- And I just, I absolutely love it.
It's what I have always wanted to do,
and I got to live my dream up until my husband passed away. And after he died, I decided I still wanted to do the travel writing, but I needed to just ship gears. And so instead of kind of general travel, so low female travel, couple travel,
now I do single parent travel. And because I mean, who needs the most help was traveling single parents? - Okay, yeah. - So it's kind of an untouched niche.
- Everyone needs help with travel. Get out there, go travel, see the world, get your passports, and fill it up. - Absolutely, absolutely. Passport is always half full,
even when life seems half empty. - Yeah, so where's your passport? Where are the stamps for them? - Oh, gosh. A lot of places, several from Egypt.
- Okay. When you travel, right? What kind of traveling are you there for? - Weeks, months, or are you live there for a while. - It could be, so I lived in Spain for a month with my toddler
in January, and that was amazing.
A friend of mine has an apartment there, and we got to stay there for the month. He was traveling, mostly our trips are like a long weekend, or a week, maybe two weeks. We were just in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria for two weeks,
which was an amazing trip, although I do not recommend June, which is when we were there. - It was really hot, but yeah, all over. I love islands, so there's a lot of stamps from islands. - Tell us where, tell us where.
- So Easter Island, it was a favorite, the Galapagos, Tahiti, Moraya, really love French Polynesia. - So you were one of those, I needed to get extra pages in my passport kind of girl, or yeah. I start with extra pages.
- Nice, so a lot, you could start with extra, you guys might just want to give me those extra pages now, so that we don't have to do this day later.
“- You can't add them anymore, you have to give them”
when you get your passport, otherwise you have to get a whole new passport, which I've had to do before. - Okay, yeah, I've got the maximum extra pages
Filled them up, so it was like maybe three times
of extra pages, and it was like a thick, thick passport.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so I love traveling. I used to be a nomad, and lived also all over as well. So I'm really interested in all your travels, where you got what you're doing, but so now you've got this, you said a blog, right?
Tell us about the blog, we'll go through them one by one. What are you traveling? - So the blog is half fullpassport.com, and all of my socials are the same, half full passport. - Okay.
- And it is geared towards single parents traveling with their kids. I've got some super helpful tips for just anybody who wants to travel, especially anybody who wants to travel with kids, and then there's a few things about widow travel,
because travel has been very healing for me in my widowed grieving journey.
I've also got a couple of kind of more emotional things
that I wasn't expecting. Like I had to show my husband's death certificate and my daughter's birth certificate to get my Kenya visa so that I could travel there, and I just wasn't expecting it. I was filling out the form and the paperwork,
“and it was like, where's your other supporting paperwork?”
I'm like, I don't know what you mean, and then I figured out what it was, and it's to prevent human trafficking, which is important, but as a single parent who is grieving, it was just surprising to me
that I had to deal with that when preparing for this really fun trip. So I have a blog post all about how to get your visa for travel in Kenya as a single parent, so that you're more prepared than I was,
and maybe it won't be quite as emotional and experience. - Well, that's a niche. - Yeah, yeah, it's truly kind of an untouched niche. There's a lot of family travel blogs out there. - So how is marketing to a single parent's foretron?
Is it the keywords easy to kind of target them? - Yeah, it's a single parent travel, solo parent travel. - But then when I'm doing Google, I'm not a single parent,
but would I be like single parent travel
“in the keywords or what are you actually targeting?”
- At times, yeah, I definitely get hits from people who are Googling that type of thing. Mostly, I, so most of my views come from Pinterest and all of my pens are like, what to do with your toddler and whatever,
I've got a blog post and all of the pens are having travel for a month abroad with your toddler as a single parent. So there's usually something in there about, as a single parent when you're a single parent.
And so when people are searching for those places, they also see a single parent in the title on the pen and then they can be like, oh, well, that's exactly what I need, you know, that type of thing. - I actually saw a good post,
not just for single parents, right? But for all parents with young kids and it was like, they're like, how to get you a toddler to sleep on the plane for the whole flight, right?
And it was a baby, I don't know when kids first walk,
when do kids first walk? - It's like around one.
“- Okay, okay, maybe he was like two or three, right?”
And he's not the escalator going up but those flat ones, right? - Oh yeah, the walk way, the walk way, yes. - So he's on that, but he's going in the opposite direction and he's just walking in the walk
and having the greatest time, you know, and then there it is, so yeah, and then it cuts a him just passed out in the plane, right? So yeah, big tip, you know, if you don't want your kid crying, you got to just tire them out before
and so that just they just knocked out, right? - Yeah, exactly. - So yeah, what are your tips for the single parents that are traveling? - You can do it and don't let anybody tell you not to,
don't tell anybody that you shouldn't because you're a single parent or your kid is too small because you're allowed to have memories, even if your kids don't have memories of that. - Yeah, and not just memory, but inspirations, right?
And new core memories, and yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons why people are single parents, right? Unfortunately, reasons, just like yourself, right, dealing with passing of a husband and other reasons that, you know,
could be divorces or whatever, but you can just get out there. - Yeah, absolutely. - And so yeah, speaking of your husband, it seems like you've set up other businesses
because of what happened. - Yes. - So one of the two other businesses and tell us our stories. - The two other businesses are the boat than the Ferria de Habea and also Elevation Journeys,
which is my Christian tour company in the Middle East. And that one I had already started about a year and well, closer to two years before he passed.
We had to stop because of October 7th,
we couldn't do tours of Israel,
so we had to sort of shift years and now we do tours of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Greece, and Turkey. - These are group tours that you're leading or you know the guides out there. - They're group tours that we put together,
my partner and I put together and often we travel with the group. - So you do the whole itinerary, you get like the private vans, you know the guides, where they're gonna eat lunch every day,
the activity is because you've spent so much time out there and you just fell in love and you're like, I'm gonna bring people to experience what I did. - Yeah, absolutely, that's really what it is. My business partner actually came to me in 2023
and he was like, "Hey, I have this sister company
"that I wanna start here, it has a successful travel company
"in Egypt and you know what I can't do it "on my own and need a partner to make it happen." And do you wanna do it with me? And I was like, absolutely, that sounds right at my alley. And I wanted to contribute to our livelihood
and our marriage just was even before I had a child. And I didn't want my husband to be the only breadwinner like I wanted to contribute. And so my partner and I started this company. We had to stop for a little bit while tensions were high.
And we've restarted, but part of the reason we had to take such a long pause was because my husband passed away on our way home from a scouting trip to Egypt. So when we were looking for places to go with our Christian tours, my husband passed away
on the flight home from that trip. And so he sort of. - And that was from-- - Take a pause. - Do you mind me asking if that was from kind of something that he had or from the flight?
- He took to death on that airplane meal. - Oh my lord, I'm so sorry about that. - Thank you. - That sounds horrible. But you are continuing to honor him by doing the travels in Egypt and everything.
- Yes. - That's amazing. That you kind of can do that for him. So that brings me to the boats, right? - Yeah. - Well, look at, let me ask you this.
How do you choose the guides, the people that are leading the trips out there, are they professional guides?
“But then you have to kind of steal those people”
from other companies or whatever. But you just find people that are like, yeah, I have time. Like, how do you choose the guides that are kind of cold leading with these? - So we, every country sort of operates differently.
Most countries have rules about their tour guides, like getting certified to be a tour guide, they have to re-sortify a few years. Most of them are free agents. So they can work for multiple companies.
And so we try out all of the guides. We make it where they want to work for us. We treat them really well, we pay them a fair wage, and a lot of other companies don't. And so we are able to get the best guides
and the most loyal guides. - So we can get to the people on your trip. Oh, we're gonna be going with Nassir, all right, I'm just kidding. Hopefully that's it, I don't know, it's just kidding to be there. - So we're gonna go in the sea, he's great, right?
And then when you get to the country,
“Nassir is gonna be the one actually guiding you, right?”
'Cause sometimes when it's with Tori Gensys, oh, we're gonna be with Nassir, he's great, I've met him as amazing, and then you get there, and it's, I don't know, another, (laughs) - Yeah, we don't operate like that.
We're a very transparent, very above board, very honest. A lot of companies, especially in Egypt, sort of operate the way that you're talking about, but if we tell you that we're gonna do something or that it's going to be a certain guide
and that we recommend them, it's definitely gonna be that.
There are always extenuating circumstances,
like we had a guide one time, who's father passed away, and so we had to put someone else in, but other than extenuating circumstances, like that, what you see is what you get, what you see in the itinerary is what you're gonna get.
- Right on, and so now that event is, and then you get this boat idea, right? Why not, you're from DC, why not down some kind of river near the Baltimore area, whatever, okay?
- 'Cause that's not where the people wanted to get. - Yeah, I mean, just so, securing a boat, I mean, all these different things that come into mind of setting up a company like that, in a foreign country like that,
“it's like, many people must be like, you're crazy, right?”
- Yes, absolutely. Tell us why you're not crazy. - Well, I'm not crazy, because we have built in clientele. My business partner has his own travel company in Egypt,
It's his primary business along with our other businesses,
and-- - He's their full time.
“- He's, yes, he's operating their full time”
and his clients are gonna book our boat, you know, instead of booking another boat, and it's better for them, it's better for us. There's no middleman in there, because a lot of people want to exactly,
we get to control the final product. We mostly do tours with Americans, and Brits and, you know, Europeans, and so they have a certain expectation. A lot of the time, the expectations
are different from the reality in Egypt, and so we get to sort of train people how we need them to be. We get to give people the experience that we know that they want, that they are gonna expect from a luxury cruise company.
And lots of people want to take now cruises. It's a huge business in Egypt. My husband and I did it on our first tour of Egypt. So the Deja Bayes are smaller, ours is eight cabins, and it can take 16 people.
- Now I'm thinking of the Dragon Boats in Vietnam. - Little bit bigger than that. - Little bit bigger than that. You can have cabins on them, yeah. They can be like eight or six or whatever,
but you're saying it a little bit bigger than that. - Little bit bigger than that. Usually two or three stories. - And two or three stories. - Usually three to four.
So you can do a four day tour from Aswan to Luxor, which is where all the tombs and temples are. We're getting tests to Mizz, or you can do this. - You're selling me, you're selling me. - All right, it sounds great.
Or you can do the three-day option from Luxor to Aswan. It's just 'cause how the week works there's seven days in a week, and so with the turnaround time and everything, it's four days up and three days back. - What's the hardest part about planning this from abroad
and kind of setting up these tours? - So the hardest part is trusting that everything's gonna go right, because things happen, whether it happens. - Whether it happens.
I mean, whether it doesn't happen all the time in Egypt, but you have just all kinds of like, I mean, I hate to say it. There's terrorism in the Middle East, and then that scares people off,
and then they wanna delay their trip, or cancel their trip entirely. I mean, that's really the most difficult part, because it's really hard to reassure people
who have never been to Egypt,
that bombing in Israel does not impact the cruise on the Nile, or even-- - Or the visiting the pyramids in Egypt. - We'll need to, who in Thailand, and you got these encampments in Bangkok, right?
But the islands are fine, Chiang Mai is fine. - Exactly. - You know, everything else is fine, right? So it kind of like that. - Yes.
- It's like less. You've been there, you had never know when you'd just be like, well, the, you know, Department of Defense, just, you know, put a travel update, do not travel, but you've got a ton of expats just live in their daily lives.
- Exactly. - And it's fine. - Yep. - Well, it's all sounds so incredible. I asked everyone, what are you most excited about?
Ooh, I'm most excited for the boat. It's just such a cool thing.
I am always wanted to have a boutique bed in breakfast,
and now I get to have that on the Nile. - Amazing. - How cool is that?
“- So what's keeping you from moving there full of time?”
- My daughter. - 'Cause they have grades, you know, there's, you know, expat schools, international schools, right? I'm sure Egypt has them, or, but, yeah,
so you wanna keep a daughter here, grow her up in the states. - Yeah, it's a little more difficult to find international schools in Upper Egypt, which is where the Nile curses are.
- Yeah. - So that's kind of the hesitation there. - All right. So yeah, you got this great boat. How do people find you?
- Find us at nithiria.com in EF, E-R-I-A.com. And you can also find me at halffullpassport.com. All of my socials are halffullpassport.com. You can find elevation journeys at elevationjourney.com, and that's all of our Christian travel
to all over the Middle East. - Okay, and I got one more question. Now that you have all these kind of single parents going on trips together, have any of you done any matchmaking?
- Haven't done any matchmaking yet,
but, you know, we're always looking.
- Yes, yes, yes. The opportunity is there, people, you know?
“All right, singles with kids ready to make all, right?”
- Yeah. - Sounds like a winner. - Yeah, come on, elevated, elevated people, on these single trips, all right. Well, thank you for joining us. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
- Thank you so much, Anna. - And yeah, you got me dreaming of my trip to Egypt on this amazing boat. - Oh, okay. - All right, all right, and thank you guys for joining us again.
And yeah, this is my friend Nora, she's able to juggle three jobs, her kid, and also international relations and cultural differences, all at the same time.
Hopefully it's inspired you and you join us again.
And listen to all these amazing stories. So thank you guys, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)
