You Can Ride Amtrak Around the Country for Free If You Are Good at Social Media
Amtrak is reintroducing free accommodations for people who are particularly good at social media – and they swear they don’t mean influencers.
Traveling by train makes the transition from one place to another one of the most important aspects of your journey; in fact, there is time and opportunity to observe the changing landscape around you, take a walk and talk with other people. This can be a wonderful experience for anyone with travel time and money. Amtrak is poised to tackle the latter issue with its new #AmtrakTakeMeThere Social Media Residency program, which offers free round-trip travel on one long-distance route and $ 1,000 in travel expenses, according to My Modern Met.
You might assume they’re looking for influencers like the Fyre Festival to ride the rails, but Amtrak insists they just need people with a creative mind on social media :
If you’re interested, we hope that you are a leader in your social media community, and that your creativity and energy allows you to connect with your followers on a deeper level. You dream of a cross-country adventure and, as an out-of-the-box traveler, bring a varied and unique perspective to your journey. You feel like the #AmtrakTakeMeThere social media residency is keeping up with your hobbies, and you could probably think of a better train pun than this one.
The application on their website is due on January 31st, and it includes several questions about you, your online community, and why you want to travel with Amtrak. I mean there are some incredible photo opportunities to start with:
They also request links to your social media pages, including YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Presumably, they will check your follower count, but more importantly, they will check that you are interacting with social media at all. You don’t have to be Gigi Hadid, but you have to have something to show that you are not just riding the train. For the right person, this can be the journey and # content of a lifetime.