Steph and Luke - Betting on Paradise and Renovating a Decrepit Hotel in Costa Rica

Extra Pack of Peanuts Travel Podcast

Travis Sherry

Society & Culture:places & Travel, Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.6 • 890 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

You've thought of it. Probably even dreamed of it. Leaving your regular life - the job, the car, the house, and the rat race - to move to a tropical location, renovate, and run a hotel. No worries, no stress. All sunshine, surf, fresh coconuts. Pure bliss. Well...you've dreamed of doing it, but Steph and Luke have actually done it. In 2020, they "bet it all" to move to Costa Rica and open up a hotel with two young daughters in tow. Heck, they even got a tv show out of it - HGTV's "Betting on Paradise." They were living the dream. What could possibly go wrong? Turns out...A LOT. Here's the full, behind the scenes story of that journey, told by two people who have some of best energy you could possibly have - and still were almost broken by it!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello podcast nerds and welcome to the extra pack of peanuts travel podcast.
0:04.8	I'm your host, Travis Sherry.
0:05.9	And with me today are two people who met in Taiwan while teaching English, lived in Toronto for 10 years, and then decided to bet it all during COVID 2020, move to Costa Rica, sight unseen to renovate a hotel property, the host of HG TVs, betting on Paradise,
0:24.3	Steph Sit and Luke, Shand.
0:25.7	Steph, Luke, welcome to show, guys.
0:27.7	Thanks so much for having this drama.
0:29.1	This is awesome.
0:30.0	I just said before we hit record, I don't think I've said yes to a guest quicker than what I did
0:35.9	because you guys reach out like, hey, here's what we're doing.
0:38.0	I thought, okay, this is everything I love in this world, bet it all, go to a fart country
0:44.4	with two young kids, renovate a hotel, completely flip up your life and then live to tell
0:50.5	about it and give the good, bad, everything in between.
0:54.3	Thank you guys for coming on, and we've got a lot of ground to cover.
0:58.4	I love it.
0:59.3	I love it.
0:59.7	So excited.
1:01.5	All right, you guys are fun enough to play along with the intro fact, the trivia question.
1:05.7	I heard Luke that you host trivia.
1:07.4	So maybe if you need a question, here's one that comes up and that you might
1:11.3	be able to bring up. So Costa Rica, known for being very biodiverse, has the total land area,
1:17.8	basically the size of West Virginia, or if you're Canadian, Nova Scotia. So we're talking small
1:23.0	here, but it makes up 5% of the world's biodiversity, not taking landmass into consideration.
	...

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