Research: A Key to Great Travel Writing
Below is an article we wrote for Travel-Writers-Exchange.com, a community of travel writers, bloggers, and journalists that exchanges tools, tips, and resources designed to help members expand their online reach and find new opportunities.
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Finding a research approach that allows you to deliver fresh, unique, and thoughtful content is one of the greatest hurdles for travel writers.
Whether you only have a few days in one location or are embarking on an extended RTW trip, conducting some preliminary research on your destination will enhance your travel experience and your travel writing.
While writing the content that would eventually become Approach Guides, we spent 75% of our time “on location” and 25% researching our upcoming destinations at our home base in Milan, Italy. To accommodate this extreme travel schedule, we developed a streamlined research process that allowed us to create unique content.
Step One: Plan Your Itinerary
To help us form a preliminary itinerary, we consult a few sources that highlight the key cultural sites (our niche) in a given destination:
- A traditional travel guidebook, such as Lonely Planet or Rough Guides
- An online travel guidebook, although there are many choices, wikitravel.org is a good place to start.
- Tour company itineraries. For our purposes, we look to tour companies that target our niche, such as Archaeological Tours;
Step Two: Focus Your Research
The remainder of this article can be viewed on Travel-Writers-Exchange.com.
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