The Five Cardinal Sins of Travel Content from Lazy Descriptions to Blatant Plugs

What makes great travel content? Certainly, it should be a pleasurable read: full of colour, touches of humour, and anecdotes that catch the reader’s imagination. It’s also nice to catch the eye of any editors who may earmark you for future work, or holiday companies looking for that perfect wordsmith who can speak to their audience in just the right tone of voice. But there’s no shortage of content writers, so how do you ensure your copy stands out?

To help you do justice to your hard work, our travel content writing experts have compiled a list of the five most common clangers made by travel writers. We hope you’ll find it useful, whether you’re busy penning a four-page feature for a women’s magazine or a blog for a growing tour company. Simply scroll down to read our expert tips.

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How to Craft the Perfect Travel Pitch

In our last travel writing advice post, we looked at ways to find fresh angles and original travel content ideas. But finding a good idea is only the beginning – once you’ve done that, you still need to market that idea. It’s time to write up that all-important travel pitch. For many aspiring travel writers, this is the most difficult part of the process.

While hopeful writers busy themselves wrangling their own thoughts, ideas and experiences into a saleable travel story, commissioners have to sift through what must seem like a never-ending influx of proposals. They too face difficult choices, having to discern what – if anything – will work for their readership and whether the freelancer will be able to deliver the job to their standards. To help both the commissioner and the commissionee through the arduous pitching process, we’ve collated six important questions – ones that writers should ask themselves before they press send, and ones editors can use to identify a winning pitch. Simply scroll down to read them all.

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Our Travels: Dubai, United Arab Emirates

The World Words team don’t simply write about travel, they live and breathe it. Whether it’s a remote corner of the British Isles, an idyllic European island escape or an old-timey North American city, this intrepid bunch have never met a holiday they didn’t like. So, with that in mind, we’ve asked them to jot down the highlights of some of their recent trips in a blog series we call Our Travels. This month, World Words writer Georgia spends a week in Dubai.

With a young son in tow, Georgia discovers an epic underwater zoo, stylish beach clubs and the real meaning of the world superlative – starting with the tallest building in the world. Simply scroll down to read about her travels…

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Georgia at the top of Burj Khalifa (the tallest building in the world) with her infant son.

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Our Travels: Quebec City, Canada

When it comes to lifestyles, World Words team members are hardly what you’d call home birds. Our globetrotting travel writers and editors are pretty much constantly on the move, scouring interesting destinations near and far, both for research and for pure pleasure. In this knowledge that our intrepid team members are always on the go, we’ve created an Our Travels blog series, allowing them to share their latest travel-related tales and experiences.

Our staff content writer Nathanael got the ball rolling with his account of a trip to the Isle of Harris. Next up, editor-in-chief Joe took us on a whistle-stop tour of Corsica. This time around, our senior content editor Mandy invites us along to Quebec City, the history-steeped Francophone capital of the Canadian province of Quebec. So let’s go…

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Mandy in the UNESCO-listed old city with the Old Quebec Funicular in the background.

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