“Award-winning travel journalist” When I am asked to write a brief biography of myself for contributors’ pages in magazines, I will often bill myself as an “award-winning” travel journalist”. And this is true, because way back in 2001, I was named Student Travel Writer of the Year in the Guardian Student Media Awards. Yes, it’s [...]
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Travel pun headlines Far be it for me to discourage the use of a pun headline (in fact, in my former incarnation as a travel magazine editor I was thoroughly addicted to them). But when it comes to travel, a few destination-related headlines tend to pop up a little too often. So, for future [...]
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First trip into the unknown When I went to Bali for the first time in 2000, it was my first real venture outside the relatively sanitised world of Western Europe and Central. Before then, I’d done the usual inter-rail circuit around the big hitters, and – barring the odd encounter with Polish tram inspectors and [...]
Useful travel gear I’m currently researching a story about travel gear and clothing, and it has got me thinking about how useless so many so-called travel products are. Many of them have so many bells and whistles but are largely designed for mountaineers or Antarctic explorers rather than members of the general public. Multi-language [...]
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Blogosphere debate Jeremy Head has written a characteristically interesting post on whether travel content that has been paid for by a company can ever be objective. As part of the debate, he references Matthew Teller’s proposal about PR agencies and tourist boards paying travel writers for articles rather than the publications they are published in. [...]
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Dear PR person. You were curious as to whether I had received your press release. I probably did. I probably didn’t read it either. Here’s why: 1. It’s not addressed to me If you’ve sent it to everyone on your mailing list in the hope that it fits something that someone, somewhere is writing [...]
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Profiting on a Ryanair flight A week or so ago, I wrote about how I’d made a profit out of Ryanair by buying a Mars bar. I paid in euros, got my change in pounds, and came out a couple of euros and a Mars bar up. Mistake on part of staff or bosses? [...]
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Great travel journalism With all the talk in the last week or so about the death of travel journalism, I thought I’d recommend what I think is the best piece of travel journalism I have read this year. It’s not travel journalism is the traditional sense of travel for the sake of travel. But I’ve [...]
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Budget airlines and Visa Electron There’s probably not a human being on the planet that doesn’t despise the absurdly high fees that budget airlines charge to pay with credit and debit cards. The best way around this, as Karen Bryan explains, is to get a Visa Electron card. Easyjet debit card loophole But fellow [...]
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Is there money in travel writing? Jeremy Head has written a fascinating piece on the new travel technology news service, Tnooz.com. He goes through the fears that many travel writers are facing about the internet taking over from print. To put it in a nutshell, where will travel writers get their money from in the [...]
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