Welcome to travel the world with Meriharakat (Finnish word for oystercatchers)! We are a senior couple who love to travel with a special interest in collecting countries. The number of countries for both of us is already over 110 – and stories from all of them can be read in out blog (but mostly in Finnish only).
We explore the whole world, preferably visiting new countries, but for shorter trips Europe is our favourite. Finland is our scenery in the summer: it is green and beautiful – and not too hot!
In Finland we also visit interesting art exhibitions and enjoy an occasional play in the local theatres, sharing the experiences with our readers.
We are the only Finnish travel blog specializing in collecting countries. We offer basic information related to the subject for Finnish readers and, of course, keep them updated on our own achievements!
On yearly basis we summarize our travels for the past year and keep updating our readers on our travel plans every now and then.
Together and competing
We participate in several blog communities: 40+blogit (adult bloggers), Rantapallo Travel Companions and ParisRio.
In 2017 we were selected as one of the Top 10 Travel Blogs in Finland by Cision after being listed as one of the challengers already in 2015.
Brandsome, which follows also blogs in Social Media listed us as number 30 for all blogs (not only Travel Blogs) and Blogit.fi, a Finnish service providing feeds from most blogs in Finland, listed us as number 2 for travel blogs at the end of 2017.
Our most popular posts
During 2017 our readers loved these stories offering information on travel security, travel costs (Algarve being the most popular) and feedback to travel agencies (TSS being the most popular):
Older post still going strong include advice for packing, presenting the very popular summer island Örö and helping people to plan their trip to Lofoten Islands:
Numbers
- Unique readers (for 2017) 67 300, 18 922 in Q1 2018
- Page loads (for 2017) 176 300, 53 666 in Q1 2018
- Female readers: 73 %
- Biggest age groups: 55+ (25,6%) and 25-34 (25,1%)
- Meriharakka on Facebook 1463 (end of March 2018) followers (2017: 1414)
- Meriharakka on Twitter 2613 (2017: 2601)
- Meriharakka on Instagram 11333 (2017: 11333)
Most recent collaborations
- sharing our cruising experiences in Hawaii and Indian Ocean as agreed with local agents (Risteilykeskus, Loistoristeilyt)
- sharing our experiences of a road trip on Gotland as agreed with Autoeurope
- covering a number of Finnish cities as agreed with their respective Visit-organizations, for example: Tampere ja Mänttä, Ahvenanmaa, Naantali ja Lohja
- covering a number of hotels, art exhibitions and plays
- promoting Bank Norwegian Visa (which we really love!)
Would you like us to tell your story?
We are always open for new ideas of collaboration – if you work within travel industry or are otherwise interested in our travels or us as story tellers, please be in touch!
- pirkko.schildt(at)iki.fi
- lasse.schildt(at)iki.fi
In Media
We are slightly famous in Finland regarding our interest in travelling, especially when we visit less common countries like Saudi-Arabia during 2017. We have given interviews to Helsingin Sanomat (the biggest newspaper in Finland) several times and have appeared in a number of different magazines, both as the object of the story or telling the story ourselves as writer/photographer.
We have also made appearances on the Finnish television several times promoting collecting countries as travel niche.
A couple of stories in English
Even if the majority of our blog is in Finnish, we have written a couple of stories also in English, being:
Our story about Örö island is written both in Finnish and Swedish as Swedish is used a lot in that area of Finland.
So occasionally we can write a story also in other languages than Finnish, if needed.