Jeremy Head's travelblather - a blog about online travel

72% of Press Releases are made up crXp!

NB: Clarification from Ash Communications follows this post (comment number 3)

Gah! Time for an anti-PR rant. I've already blathered about it... but I have to do it again. Today I received 2 press releases from Ash communications (take your place in my hall of shame - the PR Waffle catergory) splattered with useless percentages.

Take this fine piece or meaningless waffle created for their client Skiingholidays.com

Confidence is returning to the ski industry with 80 per cent of skiers who did not ski last year planning to return to the slopes this season. Skiers are becoming savvier in finding ways to cut costs to stay on the slopes, with 40 per cent of holidaymakers looking to book late, a third choosing to build their own skiing holidays using low cost flights, and 75 per cent of independent skiers investigating car hire as a cheaper alternative to often expensive transfers.

How many was your sample size? Who were you asking? How did you conduct your survey? Was there any sort of control group?

There was no detail whatsoever about where these percentages came from. RIDICULOUS.

What do you think we are? Stupid?? For goodness sake people...  you are communicating with journalists here. Most of us have an obligation to check the veracity of facts before we publish things.

Is the one remaining difference between PR and journalism that journalists have a true obligation to their audience - not to some client that they commit to pump out meaningless tripe for once a week in return for cash?

And then there was this story on Travelmole (it's password protected - so here's an extract too)

The use of micro blogging site Twitter is gaining rapid penetration within the travel industry, according to a new study. It revealed that more than half of users (52%) tweeted between four and 10 times a day, with over a quarter sending more than 10 Twitter updates daily....

The survey of 90 Twitter users who tweet on travel matters was conducted by Andy Jarosz, writer and owner of travel blog 501 Places.

I am sure this piece was lifted straight from a press release - it certainly feels like it.

We actually got a sample size here. It was 90 people. 90 people for heaven's sake! That's about as statistically valid as asking my mum and the postman! 

So... there you go... PR people writing tosh backed up by pseudo science and journalists who should know better printing it verbatim. No wonder the media industry is in crisis!

Shall we go for comments/examples of the stupidest press release you ever received? Feel free - if you can be bothered...

Social media for travel marketers - unpicking the 2.0 hype

I’m speaking at WTM (World Travel Market in London) on Wednesday 11th November.

If you’re there... drop by! Whether you’ll be there or not... how about participating now?

The seminar is called Social Media for Marketers: Unpicking the 2.0 hype. Seeing as it’s all about social networks, why not share my thoughts ahead of the seminar with my own network (ie you guys!) and see what people have to say...

I’ve got some basic ideas... but stuff people say here can and almost certainly will influence what I present. (Of course I will attribute where necessary!) Speaking with me will be Jane Nicholson one of the PR people who ran the ‘Best Job In The World’ campaign (BJitW) for Visit Queensland – a competition which went viral and was much talked about. I’ve not seen her deck yet, buy I imagine she will discuss how they went about organising the campaign and why it worked. (Feel free to let me know what you thought about it – but for my bit I will focus on other examples.)

A few thoughts - this is probably the way I will structure the presentation too:

1) Hype (or brands that maybe get it wrong?)
I didn’t choose the title. But clearly those who did, feel that there is ‘hype’ here. Is there? And if so, what forms does it take? Any examples of travel sector (or other) brands that have engaged in hype-ish activity and been caught out?

2) Brands that get it right (at least most of the time)
Look at examples of travel sector brands that use social media really well to drive marketing campaigns and/or to interact with customers. Any suggestions?

3) People are still people
A pause for breath before we get theoretical... It’s fine to get excited about ‘the power of social media’ but making a big noise doesn’t necessarily bring you more business. Most of the old principles of marketing absolutely still apply on-line (don’t they?). People still make purchasing decisions about flights and holidays according to similar principles. (Or do they?)

4) Some suggested ‘rules’ of social media
Taken from the great work the social media team at iCrossing has been doing.
- Be useful – the most important point. No one will be interested unless what you are offering is valuable to them – ie it fulfils a need. (This might be something quite trivial like make them laugh when they are bored at work.)
- Be findable – no point doing stuff if no-one knows you are doing it. SEO needs to be in the mix (along with some careful promotion?)
- Be live – the whole point of social media is that it allows 2-way interaction. You need to respond in a timely and useful manner to comments and requests. And that takes commitment.
- Be real – you simply can’t afford to try and game the sysyem. (cf 1) above and ‘hype’) You will be found out and then the network will eat you up and spit you out!

5) It’s about networks and communities
Fine to make a big noise about a campaign... but what happens next? Is ‘little and often’ a better strategy? Can you ‘build’ communities on-line? If so what do you need to do? Been reading Rachel Happe’s fascinating posts on the social organisation.

6) The importance of reputation
Participants in communities – whether on or off-line – are not all equal. Key people influence and drive them. Will the influencers in these communities ultimately mean PR is a dead profession? As communities become more and more transparent, trying to influence opinion (ie push products) within them will become impossible.

7) Privacy – and Facebook connect
I’m fascinated and terrified by Facebook Connect – and the idea of portable personal data (people talk about portable social graphs... but I find that a bit of an odd name). Basically, FB Connect (and other similar concepts like Google Friend Connect) allows you to log in to any site that adopts it using your FB login and password. How convenient! No more forgetting which password you used for what site. What it also does is carry all your personal data along too and feeds back your activity on the participating website to your status/wall updates on your Facebook profile. What FB Connect also does is share your Facebook data with that website and Facebook also gets to learn about all your activity there as well as on Facebook itself. A phenomenally powerful tool for marketers - a whole feast of rich user data - but it's shot through with privacy issues for the individual in my opinion. The link above shows some ways FB Connect could be used in the future - potentially very very interesting.

I increasingly feel the days of the big bang PR campaign like Best Job in the World could be pretty numbered. Do you?

The cake and the cockroach

I'm in the stunning city of Seville updating my Frommer’s Day by Day guide to the city. As you know, this is the first time I’ve updated a guidebook, so there’s a bit of a learning curve. But something happened yesterday I hadn’t expected.

On one of my Seville walking tours I've included a traditional coffee shop called La Campana. All my walking tours need to include at least one spot to take the weight off your feet and have a drink and a bite. This place is Seville’s oldest coffee and cake shop, full of ornate chiller cabinets filled with beautifully arranged rows of colourful cakes and sugary sweets. It trades on its reputation a bit and is pricey compared to several other places, but the location is picture perfect – on a bustling street corner in the shade. You can sit at your table on the pavement and watch the world go by as waistcoated waiters pour you a coffee or a fresh juice and bring you your yummy cake. And it’s exactly halfway round my walking tour too. So... a bit touristy, but actually pretty perfect for what I need.

Except, I and my wife (who has been here with me for a couple of days) bought some cakes there yesterday. We brought them back to my apartment. And Karen found a COCKROACH! in her cake. (‘Look on the bright side’ I told her – ‘at least it wasn’t half a cockroach!’)

But joking aside it presents me with serious issues. What should I do?

1) Drop the place completely?
As a rule with a guidebook where space is at an absolute premium, you don’t give a place a bad review. If it’s not good, you just don’t include it – there’s simply not room to write about the bad places.

2) Mention it, but give it a bad review
Despite this, it is Seville’s most famous coffee shop – it will be in every other guidebook to the city. Leaving it out could look like a glaring omission. I absolutely can’t keep it in my walking tour as a recommended refreshment stop if I am not 100% sure it’s good. These stops are supposed to be places I have carefully selected as special. An added problem is that, due to the way the format of the guidebook works, the only place I can easily include a coffee shop in the book is as a walking tour refreshment stop. There are listings chapters for Bars, Restaurants, Shops and Hotels, but this place doesn’t really fit into any of these sections very easily. (Perhaps I could put it in 'Shops'? That might work.)

3) Mention it without discussing the cockroach
Maybe this was just a one-off? After all, they have been making and serving cakes here for literally centuries. Plenty of other satisfied customers - many of them regular locals. Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt? Keep it in the walking tour.

4) Mention it but say something opaque
So, they were having an off day maybe – perhaps I mention La Campana but make it clear I’m not mad keen on the place. Say something about ‘lovely location, but the cakes are a bit sweet and overpriced in my opinion’ or similar. But can I keep it in the walking tour if I do this? I’m not at all sure.

5) Give them a chance to resolve the problem
You might well be saying I should tell the manager of the place about the problem and give him an opportunity to resolve it. I probably would do in the UK – but my Spanish is awful and (more important) there is no proof the cockroach came from their cake. I could just be saying this to make life difficult for them. (It’s a big shame we didn’t eat the cake at the shop!) I have plenty of friends here who are Spanish, so I could get them to help me explain the problem. And I might.

So – what would you do? How do you strike a balance between a one-off unfortunate experience and needing a certain type of place to fit a particular kind of guidebook format?

Scroll down to comment #21 to see my update on what happened when I went to confront the manager - cockroach in hand (well in a bag actually)

Can 'paid for' mentions ever be objective?

Interesting salvo of activity in the last couple of days. I got an email from Mark Hodson who knows a thing or two about travel SEO (there Mark you owe me a link) as well as being a respected travel writer. Along with another of the Sunday Times regular travel writers David Wickers, he set up 101holidays earlier this year.

It's a simple, clean site that aims to offer an easy to navigate list of carefully selected tour operators for people in the 'inspiration phase' of looking for a holiday. It's one of a new breed of websites that's evolving from the chaotic stew of on-line travel content sites that travel writers are creating or contributing to in the hope of somehow earning an income from their trade now that print is more or less dead. I reviewed 101holidays in an earlier post.

And it must be relatively successful as they've now launched companion site 101shortbreaks. (Bets on what will come next? Chaps I sincerely hope you have bought the domain names for... 101cruiseholidays, 101skiholidays etc.) Mark I think(?) would be the first to admit that the site makes money by charging the 101 operators an annual fee to be featured on the site. As I understand it this is the main way that Alastair Sawday makes his money - all the hotels featured in his guidebooks/website pay to be included. (If I'm wrong here, I'd be delighted to be corrected.)

At the same time, Matthew Teller posted on his blog about a way he is experimenting with to try and earn income as a travel writer. He suggested to two editors of online travel sections of newspapers that as they didn't have budget to pay him, he would ask the tourist board of the country he was travelling to if they would pay him instead. Both editors refused the idea, suggesting that it would undermine their credibility. I commented on Matthew's blog that I'd just do the deal with the tourist board and not tell the editor concerned. I fail to see the difference between the tourist board paying for a travel writer to stay in hotels, dine in restaurants (it often comes out of their marketing budget rather than the establishment absorbing the cost) and paying the writer some additional 'expenses' for his time. The editor remains totally free to edit and revise any copy submitted.

Interestingly the Federal Trade Commission in the USA has recently ruled that "bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service." (eg: you get a free night in a hotel, you need to make this clear if you then review it.) This has caused all sorts of debate in the blogosphere - both for and against. Does this suggest a future where every travel feature on-line requires a disclaimer at the end of it?

So - does the fact that content has been paid for by the company featured mean that the integrity and credibility of that content is compromised or not? 

And... are we so far down the line... with so much of travel sections these days being written off the back of press trips which are organised specifically to push a particular product from a particular company - that it really makes no difference anyway?

How do you make money from a blog?

If you follow my twitter feed, you'll know that I'm one of the columnists for new travel tech media website Tnooz. Agreeing to do this gig took some thinking. I get no remuneration for doing it (yet). And you know how much I HATE free. Shouldn't I stick with what I'm doing on Travelblather instead? Writing for Tnooz though gets me a far bigger audience - which is nice - and a degree of credibility that I didn't have before.

My first post on Tnooz evoked quite a lot of comments - it's titled The Internet Is Ruining Travel Journalism. One of the comments was from Christine Gilbert - who writes an interesting blog called Almost Fearless. (In July 2008 she quit her high-powered job, sold her stuff and dedicated herself to travelling and blogging about her experiences.)

Her comment on my post (slightly abridged - underlining mine):

.... your personal site, (ie this one, Travelblather) could be making you $1000/mo. You’re a great writer, you have the credentials and you write interesting posts. So why aren’t you one of the most popular travel writing blogs out there? Well it’s on typepad, you don’t update often enough and you need a new design. If you networked a bit with other bloggers, then you’d start building a loyal and rabid following. Heck, when you do post everyone comes running… but you don’t take it seriously as a way to make money.

That’s the problem with all travel journalists who complain about the internet– they don’t actually take it seriously. Meanwhile, people with no journalism background are building sites and doing well, because they think about it completely differently.

Some challenges, some nice compliments and some pertinent advice. I do actually take what I write here really seriously. That's partly why I don't post that often. I only want to say stuff, when I feel it's worth saying. I take time to write posts. Partly I think because I am a journo at heart, I craft stuff and tinker with it more than perhaps I need to. Do I think about this blog differently from someone like Christine? That's a really interesting question for consideration sometime... Does having a more focussed financial imperative mean the content suffers? I honestly don't know. (Interestingly Christine doesn't run ads on her blog - instead she chooses to let people make a donation via Paypal should they want to.)

Sure I'd really like this blog to earn me that $1000 a month. I do wonder if Christine really is earning $1000 a month in donations - but she has over 3000 readers subscribed to her RSS feed and 30,000 followers on Twitter... so maybe she does.

I have no idea how to monetize this blog... I use Google adwords and that gets me about $2 a month.

Other bloggers in this space are clearly thinking along similar lines.

Christine seems to suggest in her comment that it's about posting more, using a better platform (ie Wordpress) and networking. Is that really all it takes? (Actually, that could be a lot of work - networking could be a full time job I guess.)

So... can anyone help me? If someone can help me migrate this blog to Wordpress (keeping the current URL structure so I don't lose links) and show me how to set up proper advertising deals or find other ways to earn income I will share revenue from the site 50:50 for the first 6 months. Assuming Christine's numbers are correct that would equate to around $3000.(Heck if they really do help me I'll share income for the first couple of years. Seriously.)

Assuming anyone is prepared to share their secrets of monetization... I'll of course post about it here. (Unless they are so fantastic I become RICH.... Cue manic laughter, fade to black etc.)

Tips for updating a guidebook

Well. It seems hard to believe, but my Day By Day Guide to Seville has been on the bookshelves of all good booksellers (apart from branches of WHSmith at airports and rail stations) for nearly two years now. So it's time to update it for the 2nd edition. This will be the first time I've updated a guidebook. I'm due to have a kick off meeting with my editor soon and doubtless he'll give me advice and guidance. But here's my thinking in the meantime. I'd be really interested to hear from other guidebook scribes about what they do. I'll then aim to summarise the comments in another post sometime.

Checking Maps - the Day by Day format is very map heavy. Every hotel, shop, restaurant and attraction is pinpointed on a map. There are 31 maps, with roughly 400 establishments marked on them. I could divide the city up into blocks and literally walk the streets ticking everywhere off. I reckon it will be quite a complicated task. I will need to cross check all the different chapters in the book as I walk down a particular street to tick off each shop, bar, hotel etc. Or else I could just call them all on the phone and check the details by phone - would that do? I do need to verify opening hours, credit card acceptance etc.

Adding New Places - I know there are several new hotels that are good that have opened and doubtless there will be new restaurants too. I will ask the Seville Tourist Board office, but they are not over-helpful. I will also ask the Seville Hotels and Restaurant Associations. Who else?

Revising the Layout - the Day By Day format is quite prescriptive. It's all about walking tours. I think it's highly unlikely that I will drop a tour and insert a different one in its place. But should I do something a bit more radical and make clear to my publisher I've made changes and show a potential purchaser that this is a new edition?

How long will it take? I reckon it was a good three months of research and writing to do the first edition - which ran to about 40,000 words. Plotting the places on maps was particularly time-consuming, but now that the maps are all done it should be quite quick to strike out places that have closed and add in new ones. I guess re-jigging the map keys will be a bit tedious. I hope to get the second edition done in 6 weeks quite possibly 4. I plan to spend at least 3, maybe 4 weeks on location. Do I need to spend that long there?

That's the sum total of my thinking so far. It would be brilliant if other guidebook gurus could share their thoughts about the best way to go about updating a guidebook.

We've STILL no idea where to go

I had a really interesting chat across the office with a couple of colleagues this afternoon. Both were bemoaning the fact that they are trying to get organised and book summer holidays for next year after leaving it to the last minute this year and not having very good experiences.

Neither of them had the first idea where to go to online to find inspiration.

As the resident travel 'expert' (their words not mine!) I was duly consulted about the ideal place for a really sunny beach holiday in Europe in mid-summer that would work well for kids and wouldn't be too resort-like and would be pretty cheap.

Simonseeks, vtravelled, travelmuse, thetraveleditor, tripbase, tripwolf - there are a good number of contenders for the content crown for travel holiday research, but the guys in my team (who work for a web and social media company!) hadn't heard of any of them. And frankly they wouldn't trust them if they did. And having tinkered with all of them I wouldn't either.

How about Trip Advisor? "No way... can't trust the reviews on there" I was told. One of my colleagues uses The Guardian's travel pages - he reads the Guardian on a regular basis and feels he can trust it. The other uses Flickr at the moment as her best research tool for holiday destinations. "At least that way you get a real idea of what a place looks like" she said.

I'm sure that the problem right now is that what sites there are out there online that are trying to provide inspiration for the research phase of booking a holiday are still way too general and way too new to be much use to anyone. Just to see I tried Travelmuse's inspiration tool. It suggested Lisbon, Nice and Naples as beach holidays for a family. Pretty hopeless. 

I'm doing some more detailed reviewing of research and inspiration tools which I'll share on another post soon.

In the meantime, the thing that we kept coming back to is Amazon's tool that tells you 'people who bought this book also liked....' There's some interesting discussion about the problems of creating a tool like this for travel on Stephen Joyce's excellent T4 blog. As he points out... it's just not that straight forward with an infrequent and complex purchase like travel:

'People who booked the Fairmont Vancouver also booked... 'another hotel in Vancouver'  - What do I need another hotel for!?

'People who booked a flight to Amsterdam also booked... a flight to Berlin' -
Yes, but I'm going to Amsterdam, so what's the use of that?

He has his own technical suggestions which you can read about on his post, but for me it's all about people like me.

Both the Travel Editor and vtravelled attempt to profile users to match them to other users or specific content, but for now neither has enough content or users to really make this work.

Now... if Trip Advisor could tell me not just which hotel was the most popular in a place, but which hotel was most popular amongst married, adventurous travellers with no kids yet who don't mind spending a bit for something genuinely different... (ie people like me!) THAT would be useful. Interestingly for Trip Advisor it's probably too late now... I doubt the demographic information the site holds for its many millions of reviewers is anymore detailed than what sex they are.

Where would you suggest for my colleague who wants a good value beach break that's hot and sunny in summer, couple of hours flying time, Ok for kids but not a huge beach resort? (I suggested Mallorca.)

Related link: Timesonline: Is the perfect travel website out there?
PIC:by Flickr user Dano

Free? No thanks... I'd rather pay

You have to admire Conde Nast - launching new magazines in the midst of a recession. So far I've been impressed with the UK version of Wired magazine launched a few months back. The August edition carried two almost contradictory features.

One was an extract from Chris Anderson's much lauded recent book Free: The Future of a Radical Price "The web has become the biggest store in history and everything is 100 per cent off." According to the reviews Anderson suggests that we've arrived at a new paradigm. Old models of price and value are being overturned.

Anderson is not saying everything will be free... more that we will value things in different ways. Whilst some things will be given away, entrepreneurs will find new business models to make money in other ways. So a new band will give its music away for free as it will get pirated anyway. It will charge people to get a limited edition CD case, for tickets to a concert (which they will be keener to see having heard the music already), a T-shirt etc. 

A few pages earlier in the magazine, a feature about Rupert Murdoch's plans to start charging for content online. Follow the link to read the full story but to summarise;

Evaporating print advertising means income in the newspaper segment of Murdoch's Newscorp empire has plummeted. Obviously Murdoch isn't happy about the way all that 'free' content on-line makes it necessary for him to make his on-line offerings free too. But guess what. Murdoch sees readers taking up the slack by subscribing. No clever new business models... just old school subscriptions. Why? Well, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has been quietly charging customers for access to some content since 1996. And:

- WSJ has around 90 per cent of the traffic it had before it started charging
"You don’t lose traffic when you charge, if you continue a rigorous effort to let people sample, let some content be free on any given day. You can keep up the same traffic, but your core readers – 10 per cent – will buy it so they never hit a paywall. So it’s not like you flip a switch and either you have [digital] ad revenue or circulation. WSJ has both."

- The cost of getting a print subscriber has gone down
"If you’re giving something away [online], it’s harder to get people to buy the print version. But if you attach a value to the online version then it’s easier to sell the print version and, most importantly, it’s much easier to sell the print version if you bundle the print subscription with an online subscription, which is what the WSJ and FT do."

So... will the on-line future be 'free'? I hope not.

Twitter and Facebook have yet to make any real money. And there are few examples of revolutionary methods of making money on-line. For most of the 'free' gang it's...  advertising... which isn't providing anywhere near enough income to run solid businesses. Yep. I'm on Murdoch's side. I don't believe all the smoke and mirrors. Ultimately a business has to make money and I think age old business principles will still apply. I'm tired of the hidden catches, the headline rates and amazing FREE deals that are meaningless when you read the small print.

Indeed, its obession with 'FREE' means the internet encourages sleight of hand.

I HATE 'free'.

As consumers we need to wake up and realise that 'free' is rarely best. 'Free' usually means:

- You'll get hit for a charge somewhere else along the line
- You'll find the product isn't that great. If someone is giving something away for free, surely that means they can't convince anyone to pay for it?
- You won't appreciate it. Price defines something's worth in surprisingly subtle ways.

Maybe it's a bit generational. There's lots of talk of the current generation of students and schoolkids expecting stuff to be free. As if there's a quantum shift going on. But I'm not sure. (Maybe it's because at that age you have limited cash but plenty of time. So you can sift through the bum stuff and find the genuinely good stuff. As we get older we have more money but far less time. So we are prepared to pay for stuff to save time.)

Personally I don't want something 'free' with a hidden catch or that doesn't work all that well. I'd rather pay a nominal amount to use Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail, Gtalk and the rest and be sure it will work... all the time. Then I won't have to put up with stupid ads which get in the way and slow down the load times of pages. And if something goes wrong, someone will actually be motivated to fix it.

Wouldn't you?

A connected world means fewer connections

It's been years since I spent serious time just being a tourist - particularly a backpacker. But I find myself now in Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo where I recently stayed in a really well set up hostel called Singgahsana Lodge in Kuching. It felt pretty weird mixing with a bunch of significantly younger backpackers. 

The vibe wasn't that different, the clothes pretty much the same, but one thing had changed immensely.

The moment we walked into reception I could here the tones of a rather poshing sounding girl chatting on her mobile. I couldn't help ear-wigging the conversation. I sounded like she was talking to her mum about how much someone or other was winding her up and what to do about it. Over in the corner a couple of people were using their laptops and netbooks to surf the net wirelessly. There were mobile phones everywhere and I counted 5 PCS for internet access.

12 years back when I was backpacking properly, I still used Post Restante. There was an incredible sense of excitement about pitching up in say Bangkok and finding my way to the central post office. Asking if there was anything for 'Head'. The guy behind the counter would rummage through umpteen boxes and, just sometimes, crumpled and grubby, there'd be an envelope for me from home. Often I'd not read the letter it contained straight away, but would take it somewhere like a cafe or bar and pore over the pages... fantastically self indulgent... a momentary reminder that whilst the place I was visiting might feel like home now I'd been there so long, I was actually a foreignor still very much in a strange land. I had roots elsewhere.

But I'd go pick up mail maybe once a fortnight. And that was it... no more contact with the world outside my immediate environment. And I loved it that way - the sense of almost losing yourself in another place, another culture - the possibilities for being someone else, living a different existence for just a short while were immensely exciting.

Today I visited a cultural village where they put on a show of traditional tribal dances. I was again struck by the technology. One guy was playing golf on his iPhone. Another bloke was videoing the whole show - watching the real world through barrier of the LCD screen of his camera.

Technology is of course so empowering and enabling, but I'm becoming slightly smug about the fact that my mobile phone provider hasn't enabled roaming (despite my request to them to do so). I think I'm going to just call the voicemail and change the message to say I'm not in the country, don't leave me a message.

Travel for me is much about making connections with people - other travellers, locals, people in the travel industry. It's about lots of other things too - but ultimately it's people, what they do differently, what they think differently from me. And wondering what it would be like if I could be them for a day and live in their world for just a while. A sense of detachment, or otherness - I know I'm beginning to sound a bit overblown here... but what the heck... you could almost call it existential.

These days every hotel or guesthouse - no matter how far flung - is wired for email... so tempting to 'just check' and see if anything new has dropped into the in-tray.

But it's so distracting, so unnecessary. I have limited time here in a fascinating place...

Is technology killing the reality of travelling? Does a more connected world mean fewer real connections? I think so. Do you?

(Of course the ultimate irony is that to post this I've used the very technology I'm criticising)

 

The travel press trip that didn't happen

I don't do trips so much now I work for search and social media company iCrossing. But I'd got them to agree to give me a month off (unpaid) to coincide with my girlfriend's summer holidays (she's a teacher) and decided to try and pull in a commission that would allow me to go somewhere interesting without having to pay for it. We'd pay the extra for my girlfriend to accompany me and, in theory, everyone would be happy.

I've not done much of the Americas and so focussed on Central America. I found out quickly how the market has tightened. I pitched at most of the editors and found they weren't commissioning much. What they were, needed to be places that lots of readers would go to: France, Italy, Spain, Thailand, Australia.

But eventually I landed a commission to El Salvador. A new destination introduced by one of the larger Latin America specialist tour operators. It sounded seriously cool! The newspaper was a smaller UK daily national - I'm not naming it here - but it's one of four UK upmarket dailies with a circulation in the 250,000 mark.

For those of you reading this who don't know how abysmal pay is for freelance travel writers let me tell you up front. For 1500 words I was offered £250. The travel editor told me that he would welcome pictures but that he had no budget, so I'd have to give them for free. That's the going rate. (I know that to be the case). So I didn't negotiate.

I've taken my girlfriend on trips before. Usually it's easy to agree that, because she shares my room and my transfer taxi and my minibus if we're being driven around, there's no additional cost. We just pay for her extra meals. And of course for her flights.

As is often the case the tour operator couldn't help with flights. So I approached the airlines directly. In return for a free flight for me, they would get the mention in the 'getting there' part of the Fact Box at the end of the piece.

• BA and Iberia said 'not interested'
• KLM took 2 weeks to decide and then offered a 'media rate' of about £850(!)
• United Airlines wanted to know if I could guarantee them a mention in my copy as well as in the Fact Box. (Answer - not a hope. Even if I put it in there it would definitely get taken out by the sub-editor at the newspaper.) So they said No
• Continental Airlines offered a similar rate to KLM
• American Airlines offered $550 + taxes (total cost about £600)

At the same time, the tour operator came back to me and said I'd have to pay around £700 for my girlfriend to accompany me. The local operator in El Salvador decided that he could make a buck or two by effectively charging us pretty much full rate for her. I negotiated a bit. We reduced the length of the trip and cut out one long day trip to a temple outside El Salvador in Honduras. Managed to get the girlfriend's costs down to £400.

I then checked with American Airlines and found that they couldn't give any reduction for my girlfriend. Her tickets would cost around £1000.

So... my 'cheap' adventure off the back of a commission was going to cost me £600 with an income of £250 and my girlfriend £1400. (OK. I'm a nice guy, I'd have picked up half the tab for her!)

Know what I did?

I canned the trip and booked two full fare tickets to Malaysia for a total cost of £1400.

When I emailed the tour op to tell them, they suddenly found an extra £350 in the budget to contribute towards my flight costs. But, by then, I'd had enough. Interestingly when I emailed the travel ed of the newspaper, he replied in a moment and was quite relaxed. 'No problem, completely understand. Feel free to pitch other ideas my way.' This sort of thing looks like it happens quite often.

WHAT DID I LEARN?

Combining a press trip with a holiday, rarely works. Shame, because it's really good to have a second opinion sometimes. No justification for a second free ticket, but reason enough to have someone along for the ride who pays for any additional costs incurred.

Airlines just aren't interested in mentions. More interesting was the discussion I had with one American carrier. They said they'd more likely give away a free seat for Fact Box plus a copy mention in a smaller regional paper (where the editorial guidelines about mentioning sponsors in the body copy are often more relaxed) than for a single Fact Box mention in a National. Indeed 'National's are often happy to pay a media rate for flights' I was told. (Presumably for staffers. I can't think they'd pay for a freelancer?)

Central America will remain off the beaten track for Europeans because there's not enough competition on the air routes. Fares out there are at least 50% more than to SE Asia. Such a shame as it's culturally fascinating.

Travel Editors aren't that bothered about losing a feature. Let's face it, they probably have piles of others knocking about.

Travel Editors would rather commission a mainstream destination (presumably because more readers might go there and more companies would be interested to buy an ad next to that feature). Travel supplements will become increasingly homogenous. Sad for the traveller looking for inspiration, sad for the more adventurous tour ops, sad for the developing countries like say El Salvador that would dearly love some tourist cash.

Making money as a freelance travel writer is virtually impossible - unless you have a regular gig with a big circulation National or an upmarket magazine (I reckon that's probably about 20 or so people in the UK - so if you are an aspiring travel writer reading this be very aware of how incredibly competitive it is).For most of us in the trade, long haul trips are about getting a reduced price holiday or seeing some place we really want to see. Not about making money.

Or is there a way to do press trips to obscure places and make them work that I don't know about?