TripAdvisor’s ‘most prolific reviewer’ is American expat who lives in Hong Kong
With nearly 6,500 reviews under his belt, Brad Reynolds – who runs an English language institute in the city – reveals how he got hooked on travel, and what his passion has to do with fishing expeditions he took with his father
Clickbait The travelling goes all the way back to four or five years of age. My father was an avid fisherman. At weekends, he’d wake me up early in the morning, put me in the back of the car, drive to some lake in Oklahoma, drag the boat onto the water – and we’d fish, from early morning until lunchtime. Then we’d go home.
For us, a big international trip was driving up to Canada for a fishing tournament. As Americans, we didn’t need a passport for that. We did do a cruise in the Caribbean but we didn’t even need passports for that. I didn’t get one until I was 20, in my last year at the Southwestern University in Texas.
Travel torture In 1998, I made my first trip abroad as sort of a graduation gift to myself. I had a friend who’d been to Europe before and was going to London, Athens and Istanbul, so I accompanied her. Of course we didn’t book accommodations, and she was trying to find a place where she’d stayed before. We were walking around London and I was so tired, the jet lag was terrible.
Going to Athens was a bigger change and in Istanbul … I didn’t know what was going on and we were being approached by touts every five minutes. I felt I was being tortured and I remember thinking, “I don’t know why people enjoy doing this.” Then we backtracked to Athens and I thought, “I know how to do this.” When we rewound back to London – a new exotic place to me just a few weeks before – it felt like home.
A measured approach My first job was with a consulting firm in Texas, doing pension record-keeping. After three years, they sent me to London, in 2001. During any given month I was probably spending two weekends in Europe, getting £1 flights on Ryanair and easyJet. I’d write down where I went, what places I’d visited. I wanted to record that time.
Now I recognise that detail-orientation had been a big part of the fishing expeditions with my father. At university, I’d had a little book where I’d write down dates of fishing trips, where I went, what I caught, what it weighed. It was important to keep measurements.