How to make destination guides distinctive

As Jeremy Head rightly points out in his new post, there is so much destination guide content festering on the internet that much of it becomes interchangeable. Why, in essence, should you go to one site’s guides above another’s?

Many websites – be they for hotel, airlines or generic travel companies trying to build their own brand – go down the travel guide route. All seem to do much the same thing; the sort of material that you’d find in a guidebook, only in a more condensed form. In essence, they’re trying to satisfy a web audience with a scarcely altered print format.

In print, the sameness doesn’t matter too much. You generally just buy one guidebook – and you go with the one that’s most up to date or that you trust the brand of. On the web, your site has to stand out. And thus the content has to be distinctive – but how to make it so?

A few good suggestions are gathering under the comments on Jeremy’s post, but I think two things are key…

Stop trying to appeal to everyone

Most guides try to offer something for everyone; they try to cover the range of options and tastes as best as they possibly can. And this is what leads to them becoming generic – they’re not written from the perspective of a particular segment of the target audience.

To make something distinctive, I think you need to identify what that target market is – be it businessmen, foodies, golfers, art buffs or parents with kids. I’d argue that there is one target market that is scandalously undercatered for – the traveller with a reasonable budget that just wants somewhere decent to stay whilst enjoying their break. These people are often made to feel left out by guides, which insist on calling rooms for under £100 a night “budget”, concentrating on ‘hip’ cocktail bars where a drink costs a day’s wages and only really going into detail about the town’s high end restaurants. These travellers – who don’t want to stay in a hostel, but want a decent place to stay for between approximately £40 and £80 a night – make up a significant percentage of the market, but are often made to feel like tight-fisted freaks.

A guide concentrating on that sector of the market, that focuses on the good rather than the cool and the value for money rather the cheapest or most lavish, would be distinctive. It could list and review scores of hotels in the £40 to £100 bracket rather than a token one or two, and it could include those pleasant terrace restaurants where the food is reasonable and the views are nice – the ones that are often left out because they’re not cool enough.

That’s one way of doing it. The other is to have numerous pages of the guide concentrating on particular niches. What are the best places for those businessmen, foodies, golfers, art buffs or parents with kids?

Stop trying to avoid offence

When I read a guide, I want to know the bad things. They put the good things in perspective. Objectivity is the last thing I want – opinion is a vital component of a guide.

You can usually tell when a guidebook writer hasn’t stayed at a hotel or eaten at a restaurant. If they have, they usually mention something specific or one of the negatives about the place. No-one ever writes anything negative about something they haven’t experienced themselves – a feisty opinion is more likely to draw attention and see the writer/ researcher caught out in the long run. Thus, a smattering of brutally frank one-liners helps build trust.

It also, on a more cynical level, builds page views. I know when Ninemsn commissioned a series of Insider Guides, it was always the Where Not To Go pages (such as this one for Darwin) that were in the most viewed list.

Alas, it’s an easy option to paint everywhere and everything on the OK-to-wonderful scale. Highlighting negatives gets peoples backs up. Hotels and restaurants complain and cause hassle, tourist boards are less inclined to give support when coverage isn’t likely to be glowing and local people start getting overdefensive.

But to be distinctive, you need to piss a few people off. Trying to stand out on the web is like trying to be a stand up comic – you can’t rely on jokes that nobody is offended by, because no-one will come to see you. Be brave; break a few eggs to make the omelette.

Part of this comes back to identifying the audience you’re writing for. When you’re writing for everyone, there’s always that nagging doubt that your opinion of a place won’t match that of people with completely different mindset and budget. You can’t say that the ‘hip’ cocktail bar is full of tossers because a number of such tossers will be reading your guide. Once you’ve decided who you are aiming at, you can tailor the criticism. A £30 shabby two star might seem like a palace to backpackers, but it’s a poor option for that unheralded group I was speaking about earlier – they’d be better off in the reasonable chain four star that you can get for £15 more. Whether the two star is a bargain upgrade from a dorm or a down-at-heel slum depends entirely on your perspective. A guide publisher needs to decide what that perspective is first – and then tell writers to adopt it and be warts-and-all in their coverage.

Tags: bars, destinations, guides, hotels, online travel, restaurants, travel media, Travel Writing