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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No Place Like Home: Five Ways to Write In an Engaging Way About Your Home Town

The first few months were so romantic. Dinner at all the best restaurants, drinks in all the coolest bars and moonlit walks along cobbled streets. But, over time, the relationship began to fizzle out. Without realising it, you’ve ended up spending your evenings in, only venturing out to pick up the occasional pint of milk from the local corner shop.

Sound familiar? It probably does if you’re a travel writer trying to write a piece about your home town. The day-to-day routine of living in a busy metropolis can turn the bright spark that made you fall for a city into a damp squib.

How can we rekindle the magic that once made our stomping ground so alluring? How can we write as if seeing the highlights of our city for the first time? Here are some tips from the experienced travel writers at World Words.

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Once Upon a Time: How to Tell a Great Story in Your Written Travel Content

From first-person adventure articles in travel magazines to storytelling TV adverts for tourism brands, narrative has always played an important role in travel content writing. Just laying out the cold hard facts doesn’t always do the trick – even the most avid of travellers need a little inspiration and encouragement to visit a new place, try a new service or buy a new product; being told to do so isn’t enough. That’s where telling a compelling story can help.

Read on for examples of great travel narratives, and advice on how to use storytelling in your own content writing.

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12 Tacky Travel Writing Clichés to Avoid

Every writer and editor has their personal peccadilloes about overused travel writing terms such as ‘off the beaten path’ or ‘sun-drenched’, but individual qualms shouldn’t mean a blanket ban on these phrases. These may all be overused clichés, but sometimes — to borrow another particularly well-worn cliché — they hit the nail on the head.

However, there are some words and formulaic travel phrases that are so overused, they are positively exhausted. Many of them are churned out so regularly in travel writing that they have lost all meaning, and no longer register with readers. And yet, thanks to writerly laziness, these hackneyed phrases keep on cropping up again and again.

We have named and shamed 12 of the worst offenders below; our very own dirty dozen of travel writing clichés.

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Not a quaff

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