The maths on travel content creation does not work unless you multiply. A flight from Bangkok to Hong Kong on Emirates First Class costs money, takes time, and produces a finite amount of raw experience. If that experience becomes one blog post, the return on investment is terrible. If it becomes ten posts across multiple properties, the economics change completely.

This is not about spinning or rehashing the same article. It is about recognising that a single journey contains multiple stories for multiple audiences on multiple platforms. The flight review is a different piece of content from the airport hotel guide, which is different from the destination overview, which is different from the solo travel angle, which is different from the "how I planned this trip" systems piece.

Here is how the system works.

The hub and spoke model

Every trip starts with a central hub post. This is the comprehensive guide: "The Complete Guide to [Destination]" or "Everything You Need to Know About Flying [Route]." It is the longest piece, the most internally linked, and the one I want ranking for the broadest keyword.

Around that hub, the spokes are specialist posts that go deeper on a single topic and link back to the hub. The hub links out to every spoke. The spoke links back to the hub and cross-links to related spokes. Google sees a cluster of interconnected content with clear topical authority.

For a trip to Hong Kong, the structure might look like this:

Hub post:

Spoke posts on Planet Patrick:

Spoke posts on IrelandExplore (if Ireland-relevant):

Spoke posts on WayRail (if rail involved):

Spoke posts on CruiseDirector (if cruise involved):

Spoke posts on Trek Solo:

Cross-property content:

That is potentially 10-15 distinct pieces of content from one trip. Each targets a different keyword, serves a different reader intent, and lives on the property best positioned to rank for that topic.

The pipeline that makes it practical

Writing 15 posts manually from one trip would take weeks. The content pipeline reduces that to days.

Step 1: Capture. During the trip, I capture raw material. Voice memos on my phone (transcribed later using OpenAI Whisper), photos with location data, screenshots of booking confirmations and receipts, notes on what worked and what did not. This is the genuine experience layer that no AI can fabricate.

Step 2: Research. Back home, the automation pipeline runs a research phase for each planned post. DataForSEO pulls keyword data, search volume, and People Also Ask questions. Perplexity checks current facts (hotel prices, transport schedules, visa requirements). This produces a research dossier for each spoke post.

Step 3: Outline. Claude generates an outline for each post using the research dossier and the relevant post template. Each template has a defined structure: the flight review template has sections for booking, seat, food, entertainment, and verdict. The where-to-stay template has sections for neighbourhood overview, hotel picks, Patrick's Pick, and practical tips.

Step 4: Draft. This is where the Brand DNA matters most. Each property has a detailed personality document that Claude receives as a system prompt. Planet Patrick's voice is different from IrelandExplore's, which is different from Trek Solo's. The same destination facts get framed differently for each audience.

My voice memos and personal notes get injected here. The AI structures and expands, but the first-person observations, opinions, and recommendations come from my actual experience. This is the E-E-A-T layer that Google values and readers trust.

Step 5: Review. The pipeline flags anything suspicious: hallucinated hotel names, prices that seem wrong, affiliate links that do not resolve, and the forbidden words list (vibrant, nestled, bustling, boasts). I review every draft before publishing. The AI gets me to 80 per cent. The last 20 per cent is where my expertise earns its keep.

From landing back home to having the 12 draft posts ready for review takes two days. I like to spend time on the draft that AI contributes to, so I spend at least another day checking tone, angle and links, and ensuring photos are the best choice for each post.

The affiliate layer

Each spoke post has natural affiliate placement points built into the template:

The affiliate links are part of the post template, not afterthoughts. When the pipeline generates a where-to-stay post, the Stay22 link formula is applied automatically to every hotel mention. The Patrick's Pick hotel gets a featured placement with a longer recommendation.

This means every spoke post has revenue potential from day one. The hub post links to all of them, distributing traffic across the cluster. A reader who arrives at the flight review might click through to the airport hotel guide, then to the destination accommodation post. Each click is another page view, another ad impression, another potential affiliate conversion.

Why this matters for solo creators

I run eight properties alone. There is no team, no editorial calendar managed by five people, no budget for freelance writers. The content multiplication system is what makes it possible for one person to maintain a network of sites that would normally require a small company.

The key insight is that the work is not in the writing. The work is in the travelling, the experiencing, the forming of opinions. That is the part that takes time and money and cannot be automated. Everything downstream from that experience, the structuring, the drafting, the SEO optimisation, the affiliate placement, can be systematised.

The system does not replace the creator. It amplifies them. One trip, 15 posts, eight properties, one person.

The idea that AI means the Death of the Writer is both true and false. I used to start my 2006 travel blogs with a notebook and a nice pen. Often, I still do that at the ideation level. What I have now is a system that allows me to convert every post in my imagination into a real post that's in the service of my reader. The sharpening gaze of automatic fact checkers and tools that spot low quality output have taken a lot of sloppy writing (both human and AI) out of commission. That's no harm, nobody wants to read an affiliate farm. And the process of doing that (Google HCUs in particular) has damaged smaller and genuine bloggers and creators, including me. But we have an opportunity to reframe ourselves and writers and creators by keeping that human spark alive in a way that harnesses the technology and makes it work for us and our readers. That's what my systems do.