Today, we’d like to introduce you to Peta-Gaye Daniel.
Hi Peta, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My name is Peta-Gaye Daniel, and I am a 43-year-old wife and mom pursuing my passion for travel and content creation through my dynamic content creation business, My Cruising Family, LLC. With a name like My Cruising Family, of course, there’s more than just me involved, so let me introduce you to the family: there’s my husband, Allan; our 13-year-old son, AJ; and our 9-year-old son, LJ.
We also often travel with my mother, Sharon, aka Grandma. Travel is a passion that dates back to my childhood when I took my first international flight at 4 years old, while content creation is much more recent. Although My Cruising Family, LLC., the blog, and the social media presence started in 2017, my intentional creation of content, and making content creation a study, started in mid- to late-2020.
I first flew internationally with AJ when he was 5 months old, and with LJ when he was 2 months old, I didn’t have Instagram and YouTube back then, but I would always share photos and details from our travels on my personal Instagram page, and friends and family would often have questions about how we managed a trip with the boys being so young. Some friends and family encouraged me to share our photos and information on Instagram, which again, I didn’t even have an account for.
I didn’t jump at it right away, but when I eventually started, in 2017, it was with no strategy and no concept of algorithms. It wasn’t until the global shutdown in 2020 when I was 39 years old, recovering from open-heart surgery, learning how to juggle schooling our two sons at home and scrolling the internet more than usual that I started to make content creation a study, and I found that, even while not traveling, we have a wealth of knowledge and inspiration to not only share on social media but also to receive.
It was during the 2020-2021 global shutdown that My Cruising Family’s social media accounts first grew tremendously from forming genuine connections across platforms. The people we connected with then, continue to journey along with us now, as we’ve resumed traveling the world and as we continue to form new connections.
It’s for this reason that I say My Cruising Family is a dynamic travel AND lifestyle brand. For most of the folks in our online community, travel is a common interest, but we connect on a deeper level – on family, on faith, on health, on work, on school and community events, and on life.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has not always been smooth sailing for My Cruising Family. Content creation, being a large, but still fairly new industry requires a lot of trial and error, which we are still enduring.
Beyond that, though, I am a full-time working wife and mom, working a challenging full-time job separate and apart from building My Cruising Family the business. Neck-and-neck with time management is the challenge of finances, as this is a business that is not funded by investors or crowdsourcing right now.
My Cruising Family is primarily funded by bootstrapping, meaning putting my own funds into building the business. Therefore, while my business vision and ideas are huge, the current funds don’t always match those visions and ideas. Nevertheless, My Cruising Family is rooted in faith, so I continue to pour in as the Lord leads, guides, guards, and sustains me.
Additionally, I have now created a business that focuses on our family vacations, and sometimes everyday life, producing content, which essentially translates to our vacations and everyday life being work for me – and, in some instances, for my family as well. That is the polar opposite of the balanced life My Cruising Family seeks to promote.
So, while building this business to encourage busy moms to take breaks, unplug, spend quality time with their families, step away, and enjoy a couple’s vacation or solo getaway, as needed, I am being challenged to unplug also. Making sure that I actually relax on vacation, although I will likely be creating content, is probably the biggest challenge of this business.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My Cruising Family is a travel and lifestyle brand that produces dynamic travel content that is far more informative, relatable, entertaining, and effective than any major travel website provides. My Cruising Family’s content shows travel as accessible.
Instead of simply telling people that they can travel with their families, My Cruising Family shows working-class families, like ours, that traveling with children is accessible, affordable, and manageable, while openly acknowledging the real challenges that can come along with traveling. Seeing us actually take the trips we dream about, whether it’s a Caribbean cruise or a long-haul flight to Dubai or South Africa, inspires families to book their dream vacations.
The details we provide equip them to confidently make the trips happen. The real talk I share from a mom’s perspective – for example, packing for the whole family, or managing picky eaters – keeps the online community engaged because they know we can have real down-to-earth conversations where they can ask real questions and get real answers.
As much as travel fueled the start of My Cruising Family, LLC., and is still very much a big part of the brand, my experience over these most recent years has been one of building genuine, meaningful relationships with the folks who interact with our content. That is truly where we excel. Yes, we build these relationships through sharing our cruising and other travel experiences, but also sharing glimpses into our daily lives.
Presently, what I am most proud of regarding My Cruising Family are two things that set this brand apart: (1) Engagement and (2) Vision. When I periodically check My Cruising Family’s Instagram engagement rate, @mycrusingfam is consistently at over 90% engagement, which is huge!
According to HootSuite, “Most social media marketing experts agree that a good engagement rate is between 1% to 5%. The more followers you have, the harder it is to achieve.” Yet, with close to 6000 Instagram followers, presently, My Cruising Family’s engagement rate is consistently high, showing that followers actually engage with me, and I engage with them.
Recently, I have been re-focusing on the initial “why” that pushed me into action in 2017. My “why” when I initially started the My Cruising Family blog is written in a blog post from September 2, 2017 – A snippet of it says: “My Cruising Family seeks to build an online community of families who love to cruise together, as well as those seeking to learn more about family cruising and those considering cruising.”
Additionally, my vision also included the following statement in that blog post: “In addition to what is already highlighted above, my vision and hope for this blog, website, and organization is for My Cruising Family to be able to gift vacations to families who have gone through significant challenges that make it difficult for them to vacation together.”
Now that I have built the online community as I had envisioned, I am working towards bringing that other component of my vision to life. By focusing more on monetizing content this year, including creating solid brand partnerships and securing the right brand deals, this year and beyond, I am working to bring to life the vision of gifting travel to families that have been through significant challenges. That, I will love!
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
First and foremost, I thank the Lord Jesus Christ for life, vision, passion, and purpose, not only for myself but for my family and this business. I thank my family, specifically, Allan, AJ, LJ, and my mom, for their love, support, and patience with me. I thank them for indulging me with the cameras in their faces during our vacations.
I thank Miami’s own Coach Seneca Williams, The Entrepreneur’s Therapist, with whom I had a number of sessions back in 2017 to talk through my thoughts and clarify my vision and the initial business model. To this day, she still shows support for My Cruising Family’s work.
I thank each and every person who is subscribed to My Cruising Family on YouTube and follows My Cruising Family on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and those who have read and continue to read our blog posts. I thank my circle of fellow content creators – they know who they are – who have been super supportive and informative as we share, learn, and grow with each other.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mycruisingfamily.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mycruisingfam/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mycruisingfamily/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MyCruisingFamily/
- Other: https://linktr.ee/mycruisingfam
Image Credits
Sequoyah Daniel Photography, Phazion Photography, and Natalie in Cape Town for Flytographer
