Travel Writing – Why you should write about somewhere you have never been
Isn’t the great advantage of being a travel writer actually visiting the places you’re trying to write about? Well, actually no. There are some sound advantages of being an armchair travel writer. Writing about your own travel experiences can actually unwittingly distance you from your clients.
There are two ways this can happen.
1) Your experience may not be what they want. You may have partied in Ibiza and had the time of your life. You can’t imagine anyone not experiencing what you did when you were there. Sure you did a bit of sightseeing and that was great, but the underlying push that you may not even recognise in your blog post, will be to party in Ibiza. For someone interested in going to Ibiza for its incredible beaches and breathtaking landscape, the information you’re offering may be one-sided and is just not going to be enough, and may even be off-putting.
2) Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant somewhere foreign, the waiter is rude, your food is awful and it’s the first sunny day in a week. Now you have to write travel content about it to convince clients to go there. Would you be able to keep the memory of that awful experience out of your writing? It would be the equivalent of recommending a restaurant to friends when the last time you went you were violently ill. Your efforts to keep emotion out of your writing may come across as false and more like a sales pitch than you intend it to.
So how do you sell a destination you haven’t actually been to?
Try to remember the last time you planned a trip. Remember the excitement of going through hundreds of pictures, reading travel blogs, talking to friends and longing for time to hurry up and convert the planning into actually going? Remember how you felt wistfully staring at pictures of bright blue seas or rolling green hills or partying festival goers?
That is the feeling you want to evoke in your clients. Because it’s not up to you to tell them how they will feel when they get there, you can’t ever be sure that what you felt will be their experience, and what is the worst emotion someone in the travel industry can evoke in a client?
Disappointment over unmet expectations!
The purpose of your blog is to spark that wanderlust in your reader, the urge to dig out their passport and book their leave, not travel somewhere and feel the same as what you felt, there are too many factors which may affect someones stay – the aim is to get them there, to experience their own adventure, in whatever form that takes.
What you feel when you are in a foreign place is deeply personal. It’s not your job to sell a feeling when writing about a place, but rather you should be selling the potential for emotion.
So how do you tell people they should visit a place for the possibility of emotion?
You don’t.
You sell the idea of an experience, and if you’re a travel writer worth the title – your travel content will spark that need for action (to book, to call, to go…), whether you’ve been to the place or just fantasized about it.
Want to know how to use social media for your travel company? Check it out here.
