An old boss once said, “Unless you start a project with clear objectives, goals and rules – you’ll never get anywhere.” He wasn’t wrong.
Mainly Miles has been a collaboration effort from the beginning, although admittedly Andrew spends far more timing writing than Eddie ever does (lazy), and as we’ve travelled together for many years we have a pretty solid foundation of common ground. In the beginning there seemed little point in setting down hard rules or even sharing our motivation and internalised processes with our readers.
But we have grown. And grown much, much faster than we had anticipated. Total article views reached over 100,000 in less than 5 months. At the time we were astounded, but we now achieve that total every 3 weeks.
In October alone the view count hit just under 130,000, with the site reaching a new record of 11,400 views from over 8,000 visitors in a single day!
We have received warm, genuine feedback and interactions with our readership that has surprised us both; we aren’t alone as premium travel addicted aviation enthusiasts.
As with all feedback, not all can be positive. Thankfully we are thick-skinned from our 20 years of working in the industry. Some of the accusations were true – perhaps some of our findings do fall under the “first world problems” category, but we feel that being honest is important. Some of the other accusations were not true – we certainly weren’t paid to say nice things – and actually our reviews are rarely ever a solid wall of compliments, for which we have also taken a fair amount of flack.
So that’s how this article spawned – this is us, Mainly Miles, sharing with you, our readers, the rules by which we will “live and die”. Moreover, these will act as rules which we use as a “check and balance” to ensure we stay true to our word.
Our tag line – Expert, Unbiased, Independent
A significant amount of discussion was had in the Mainly Miles office (alongside a significant amount of wine) when it was suggested that we condense our objectives into a short tag line. As you may have seen from some of our reviews (that occasionally spill over the 7,000 word boundary!) we are not men of few words.
We generated a list of words. Some felt obvious, some felt empty and others felt aspirational. We chose words that resonated with us as professionals. They represented what frustrated us in some other blogs (yes, we read other blogs!). They also felt possible to abide by even with our growing readership. Most importantly they are words that will challenge us in the future and sticking to them will keep us on the “straight and narrow”.
Expert
It is a little difficult to write about this. We have mentioned a few times that we are both industry professionals. Regular readers will also notice that we don’t ever show our faces in our photos.
We believe that the key feature of any good review is being representative of the experien