Gabby Beckford didn’t always love exploring new places. With a travel agent mother and a US military officer father, she was constantly on the move during her childhood. She didn’t like how she consistently made new friends in one city, only to leave them behind a few months later.
Beckford’s mindset changed on her first solo trip when she was 17, backpacking for 24 miles through Iceland.
“I was the only person of color, one of the few women, and didn’t speak the language, so it was very overwhelming but that was the moment that really inspired me to dive deeper into travel,” she told Business Insider. “I realized that I was so much happier being uncomfortable in a new country than I was being comfortable with the status quo back home.”
Today, the 28-year-old travel and lifestyle creator has traveled to over 40 countries and amassed a following of almost 500,000 across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Beckford has also grown her business over the past 10 years; since January 2023, she’s earned $291,085 from seven different income streams, according to documentation of her earnings viewed by BI.
Her biggest source of income is brand partnerships, collaborating with companies like Delta Air Lines, Marriott, and Tinder, which pay her to post sponsored content promoting specific services and products.
“Brand partnerships seem really inconsistent for a lot of creators because it feels like it’s not in their control, but it is for me,” she said. “I pitch just as consistently now as I did when I was first starting out, so that’s how I control the narrative.”
The first brand deal came when she was still studying biomedical engineering
Even though Beckford knew she wanted to pursue travel content creation as a career after her Iceland trip, an engineering degree was still the plan, according to her parent’s wishes. Her father, who had immigrated from Jamaica, wanted his daughter to have the kind of stability that he didn’t have when he was young.
“The need for an engineering degree was very much a first-generation immigrant mindset and I wanted the stability of that career just in case travel didn’t go according to plan,” she said.
The year she started college for her biomedical engineering degree was also when she decided to start her travel blog, called Packslight. A year later, in 2014, she posted to Instagram for the first time.
In April of that year, Beckford landed her first paid partnership with the brand BondiBoost haircare, which paid her $2,000 in exchange for posting three Instagram posts and three Instagram stories.
“That was the lightbulb moment for me, when I realized that I could work towards making this full-time, I just needed to scale up,” she said.
Almost every day, she pitched brands she was interested in working with, soon developing long-term partnerships with travel-related companies like luxury hotel chain Atlantis, The Palm in Dubai, Hilton hotels, and the study-abroad program Go Overseas. She also gets many requests from companies who want to partner but says one of her main criteria is how the brand prioritizes diversity and inclusion.
“I always try to make sure I’m not being tokenized as the one diversity hire, so I do a lot of research on the company and ask questions to see if other people of color are regularly included in campaigns or on a project,” she said.
She said if she turns down a partnership request because it doesn’t fit her niche, she tries to have a frank conversation with the brand about how it can be more inclusive.
“I try to frame it as an educational moment, but unfortunately a lot of the time the brand is coming from a place of, ‘We don’t want to listen. Take the money or get out,'” she said.
Ad-revenue sharing programs, grants, and memberships are also big drivers of income
Recently, Beckford started selling memberships, where her followers can pay her $25 a month to access more exclusive content, such as detailed information about how Beckford pitches brands, her rates, negotiation tactics, webinars, tailored Q&As, and more. The private community is housed on the platform Circle and acts as a group chat with Beckford and her followers.
“Followers are really interested in more private communities these days, and they’re very willing to pay for that access,” she said.
She’s also scaled her ad-revenue-sharing income on platforms like Facebook, where she makes videos and earns money from the ads that play when someone is watching. She runs ads on her blog through the ad-marketing service VN Media, as well.
Travel-related grants and sponsorships are another way Beckford earns lucrative income. She’s participated in paid programs like LinkedIn’s Creator Accelerator Program and Meta’s WeTheCulture Black Creator Program.
“I was always digging up scholarships and grants to fund college, so I just applied that expertise to hunting for creator-focused opportunities that would help me fund my expenses,” she said.
Here is how much Beckford’s made from seven different income streams from January to December 7, 2023:
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