Mark Wyld

Co-founder & writer, Street Eats & Window Seats

Mark Wyld from Street Eats and Window Seats
Mark, on the road somewhere between street food stalls and hotel breakfast buffets.

I’m Mark, one half of Street Eats & Window Seats. I write about hotels, flights, street food and the small, practical stuff that trips up midlife couples when they travel — parking, eSIMs, whether an area is actually safe, which breakfast buffet is worth getting up for.

Bec and I are small-town Aussies who’ve been travelling together for over 26 years and have visited more than 45 countries, almost always while working full-time jobs rather than as digital nomads with endless time. We’ve dragged our daughters, Willow and Marley, along plenty of times too. Most of what I write comes directly out of trips we’ve actually taken: the hotel we stayed in, the eSIM we actually used, the street we actually walked down at night to see if it felt safe.

I grew up in a small country town of about 4,000 people a couple of hours east of Melbourne, and I still live in regional Victoria today. I’m self-taught: no background in web design, writing or SEO, just a lot of years figuring it out by trial and error while working full-time in community care and disability support. Blogging started as a way to get free entry to attractions around Melbourne back in 2016, and it grew from there. Bec edits and co-writes most of what goes up.

What I write about

Three things mostly: hotel and accommodation reviews, practical travel tech like eSIMs and VPNs, and honest safety and area guides for destinations that carry a scarier reputation online than they deserve. If a hotel’s parking situation is confusing, or a city’s crime stats tell a different story to its online reputation, that’s the kind of thing I’ll go and check properly rather than repeat what everyone else has already written.

A few examples of that approach:

How we work

We book and pay for most of what we review ourselves. Where a post includes an affiliate link, it’s disclosed on the page, and it never changes what we actually say about a hotel, an app or a destination. If something wasn’t good enough, we say so.

I’m not a travel agent, a journalist or a safety professional. I’m a traveller who’s done a lot of it, who checks the official sources before repeating a claim, and who’d rather tell you a parking fee is annoying than pretend a hotel is perfect because it comps nights for reviews. That’s really the whole pitch.

Elsewhere

I’ve been part of Travel Massive, the global travel industry community, since 2015. Travelpayouts also interviewed me in 2024 about how blogging and affiliate marketing actually work for a family of self-taught Australians doing it alongside full-time jobs. FeedSpot has ranked Bec and me among their Top Australian Family Travel Influencers, and Discovery Holiday Parks featured our nine-day Victorian road trip across their parks in Nagambie Lakes, Lake Hume and Bright. We’ve also written for Klook themselves, on their own blog, about our Nusa Penida day trip.

Watch instead of read

A lot of our reviews come with a video walkthrough too, filmed on the day. Subscribe to Street Eats & Window Seats on YouTube to see the hotel rooms, the street food and the honest reactions that don’t always make it into the written post. We also post family travel videos on the Wyld Family Travel channel.

Other places we write

Street Eats & Window Seats isn’t the only thing we run. Depending on where you’re headed, these might be useful too:

Get in touch

Got a correction, a tip, or a destination you want us to cover honestly? Email me, or find us on Instagram, X, TikTok and Facebook.

For the full story of how Street Eats & Window Seats started, read more about Mark & Bec.