WHO WE ARE?
We live in Paris, we are in our mid 30’s (… ok late 30’s) and we both have office jobs… We are not professional travelers or web designers… We just love discovering new countries!
Julien
I am the master organizer and, the one who takes action. Impatient, I sometimes want to rush into things, which brought us into funny situations… I get bored quickly so I am always on the lookout for exciting adventures.
Ally
I am the messy perfectionist and somehow a dreamer. I can spend several days researching on a really tiny detail like, should I seat in the right or left side of the plane to enjoy the view? I struggle with decisions because I never want to compromise…
SNEAK PEAK
What You Will Get By Following Us
Mayven’s is all about giving you access to:
Practical travel information from people that are travelling like you, on their holiday time. For us one day of holiday is sacred and we do want to optimize each one of them!
Travel inspirations because we’ve spent millions of hours tailoring each trip to make it perfect. We are rarely satisfied with premade itineraries from travel agents; we are always looking to add something special.
Independent and honest feedback from demanding travelers.
The things you need to know when starting a blog in 2020 when you know nothing about blogging. We’re not going to tell you how to be successful in blogging (we’ll have to have some success to do that) but simply share with you the many questions that we had to answer when beginning this long journey. From how did we design our website ourselves with zero experience in coding or web design, to the mistakes we’ve made from the beginning, the resources that were useful to us…the best tutorials. We found that many articles failed to speak to people who really start from scratch with no experience.
Our non-professional advises on travel and photography gear. Let’s face it we are overwhelmed with new awesome tools like drones, digital cameras, action camera…it is becoming a real challenge to choose. We’ll tell you what we have and what we think about it.
MINDSET
How We Like To Travel
We have so little holidays that we really want to make the most of it… we want to see the best place, stay in the best hotels, do stuff that only few people did… and we want variety (spending 10 days in a beach club is just no way for us,…)
Now, we like adventures but we’re not reckless, Ally is just scared of about anything (she cries in planes, in boats and, …in cars as well…), she has a six senses for finding out about the most worrisome things about a destination…from the tiny deadly bugs that you can encounter, to the most dangerous roads that you will have to take…
For each specially curated itinerary, we tried to get the perfect balance between: ACTION, ADVENTURE, LUXURY, CULTURE and VARIETY
Luxury
We like to come back from a trek and rest by the fire of a beautiful and cozy hotel. We like food so much, that this is part of our selection process when it comes to hotels. We usually prefer small boutique hotels, as we want to avoid crowd and appreciate personal attention. Big resorts even if very luxurious are usually not our cup of tea.
Adventure
A luxury hotel is good to have but cannot be enough. Farniente on the beach is difficult for us, Julien hates it and, I get too hot after 30 min! So, we strive to find destinations that offer some degree of adventures with a reasonable amount of risk, but again there are many travelers that are more reckless than we are.
Picturesque Landscapes
Because nothing touches us as deeply as a beautiful landscape, all our itineraries are mostly built around beautiful landscapes, nature, and wildlife. Nothing makes us more eager to travel than a documentary on National Geographic or BBC… #Living the life of David Attenborough!
STORY
How Did We Get There
Let’s clear out something… Why Mayven…? We could go on and tell you that it’s an amazing anecdote that goes back to when we were someplace far far away and something extraordinary happened to us … Nope… It’s just the contraction of both our last names… and it had a nice ring between Heaven and Maven…Did we spend hours coming up with that? Definitely … actually several days… That was PURE creativity!
Now, you’re probably thinking why did we start a travel blog… there’s so many out there… it’s true that seeing all these travel blogs was quite depressing as we’re probably not the best at taking pictures, nor at writing … I am not even sure we’re so fluent in English… we’re French so it’s not in our genes to speak foreign languages very well!
We started this blog because we love travelling but mostly because, coming back to when we are planning a trip, our due diligence process is probably more thorough than most people (at least to everyone we know!)… We literally spend months planning our trips, as we want each of them to be a masterpiece! When we showed our friends our 70 tabs excel spreadsheet with all our research on countries we did and those we want to do… they thought we were just insane… #don’t judge
So instead of throwing all this research and efforts down the drain we thought that sharing it with as many people as we could, would make us feel useful. And let’s not forget that we are French, we are famous for gastronomy, haute couture…and complaining! So we’ll tell you our genuine feedback on the things that we loved and the things that were not worth our limited time.
Hopefully, you’ll like it!
Julien & Ally