Nicky Kelvin is a man who is always travelling. All over the world, all of the time. In fact, he’s in the air more often than he’s not.
As the face of The Points Guy UK, a website that helps millions find cheap deals on luxury flights, he has an enviable job: reviewing first-class air travel and five-star hotels. If you are one of his hundreds of thousands of social-media followers, you will have seen photos of him posing with cabin crew or grinning in obscenely beautiful, far-flung locations.
But of all the places that the self-proclaimed travel geek has been, nowhere, he says, compares to Israel.
“If anybody asks me where my favourite destination in the world is from a travel perspective, I always talk about Israel,” he says.
Kelvin, who is Jewish, says his love for the country comes from his deep connection with the land and the people. He calls himself a “really liberal, staunch supporter of Israel”, and has always tried to avoid politics when speaking to his followers about his favourite country.
When he posts online about Israel, he tells the JC, he does his best to “try and bridge the gap” between the polarised factions by promoting a message of peace. “But still I get people who are like, ‘there’s only one side to the story.’ There just isn’t one side. It’s ridiculous.”
Brought up in Leeds in a tight-knit Jewish community, his family attended an Orthodox synagogue and adhered to tradition. “Like many diaspora communities, we grew up very passionate about Israel,” Kelvin says. “I was never allowed out on a Friday night ever, until I was 18.”
From the age of 13, he was involved in the Federation of Zionist Youth. “Being part of a Zionist youth movement provided maybe a different angle for me to express my Judaism,” he says.
Kelvin, 37, deferred a law degree at Birmingham University to spend a gap year in Israel, an experience he described as “transformative”.
After completing his law degree, he returned to Israel for another year, during which time he worked as a photojournalist, a waiter at a restaurant on a beach in Tel Aviv, and a nanny.
One of the children he looked after – who was just a year old at the time – is now a teenage fan of The Points Guy and the boy’s mother contacted Kelvin to tell him that her son, Yoni, had been watching his videos on YouTube without knowing the man on the screen used to be his babysitter.
Returning to the UK after his year in Israel, Kelvin worked as a music lawyer for record label Virgin EMI, while developing his own travel-advice brand, the Miles Mogul, and doing odd photography jobs.
The Points Guy, launched in 2010 by American travel blogger and businessman Brian Kelly, seems an almost too-perfect role for someone with the interests, business acumen and on-camera charisma of Kelvin.
His YouTube videos, which feature everything from airline comparisons to train v plane races, are surprisingly bingeable, even if you are not planning a trip. When The Points Guy’s parent company Red Ventures expanded into the UK, Kelly swiftly hired Kelvin to be the face of the new franchise.
“What we do is help people travel better,” Kelvin says. When he meets followers on the road, they’ll often tell him, “I’m in this seat because of you.”
When I spoke to him, he had just been away for two and a half weeks, flying almost every other day. Starting in Manchester, he flew to Iceland, Boston, New Hampshire, New York, Los Angeles, back to New York and finally to London, where he was when we spoke. But he was in London only for the day; the next day he was off to Australia.
Kelvin’s career brings new meaning to the old Ralph Waldo Emerson adage “It’s not the Destination, it’s the journey”. On most trips, he doesn’t get to do much at the destination – and he leaves the hotels content to other people.
Since his area of expertise is air travel – especially getting you the best deals on flights – it would seem an awful waste not to take the chance to glean a few travel tips.
“The way to save money on flights, especially business-class flights, is to look at flying from other European airports, not London,” he says. “If you’re flying to New York, for example, sometimes you can find incredibly cheap business-class flights from cities like Dublin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, easy cities to get to from London.”
His other tip is so good it seems like a kind of travel cheat code: use airline shopping portals to earn points for flights. “British Airways and Virgin both have shopping portals... all online retailers are on there, and you just click through to your retailer, and then make your purchase as usual with the retailer, and it tracks in the background and you get paid lots of points on your purchase – the multiple is huge.”
Kelvin leaves me with Besides his impeccable travel advice, perhaps the most important reason Kelvin so aptly suits the role of The Points Guy is that he never really tires of flying. “I love airports and I love planes, it’s where I thrive,” he said.
