Maria Hunt is a champagne & sparkling wine obsessed, traveler, mixologist, cook, editor, author, educator, fashionista, nature girl & Chicagoan at heart.

What qualifies her to be the AirTripping hostess, besides being a curious traveler who has snowmobiled across a glacier in Iceland, toured private mansions in Champagne, made pasta in Apuglia as well as new friends along the way?

Maria is also an experienced and passionate journalist and content strategist with 10+ years success in planning, creating and editing compelling lifestyle and news content for online, print and television audiences. She launched content portals for two websites, including brand-building consumer content portal for national retailer’s e-commerce site. Maria is an expert at creating buzz via social media tools. Adept at creating SEO-optimized rich content, blogging and back-end work including HTML coding and troubleshooting. Project manager for lifestyle photo shoots including concepting, photo styling and art direction. She’s conversant in Spanish and French. 

Her other relevant skills include:

Strategic content creation & launching content portals – Analyze target audience and brand needs to create meaningful content strategy. Use Insights into what works online to create timely editorial plan for launch of SDNN food channel – created popular SDNN.com including Eight Great list feature that received high traffic and was adopted site-wide. At national retailer, achieved Google search top 10 ranking for key party planning search terms after 3 months. Create editorial schedule, hire and edit freelancers, maintain budget, upload data to CMS. Develop and maintain editorial style guide, ensuring content is brand-right. Monitor site metrics and modify content plan accordingly.

Travel editor  – Fodor’s Guide San Diego dining and hotel editor for editions 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011 responsible for setting tone for sections, selecting listings, assessing quality according to set criteria and creating a mix of content that’s inspiring, informative and accurate.

Storytelling – Award-winning journalist who knows a good story and the best way to tell it with words, images and music.  Adept at creating rich multimedia packages for inspirational, how-to, informational and marketing purposes. Developed and delivered on-air television segments. Blog on platforms including WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr.