Getting Started: Your Guide to Travel Writing
Travel writing is so much more than just documenting your trips or describing how to get from A to B. It’s about telling compelling stories that transport readers to new places, and immerse them in the experience. Whether you’re writing for magazines, starting a blog or YouTube Channel, writing a literary travel book or creating content for brands, travel writing is a skill that combines storytelling, research, and industry knowledge alongside your own distinctive voice.
In this section, we’ll cover:
- What travel writing really is
- The different types of travel writing you can pursue
- The essential skills and tools you’ll need to succeed
What is travel writing?
The best travel writing will transport you somewhere new. It takes you on a journey.
Travel writing is the art of capturing the essence of a destination—its landscapes, culture, people, and experiences—through words (and often images). It can range from immersive literary stories to visual storytelling in magazines or online, to practical guides that help travellers navigate new places.
Great travel writing doesn’t just describe a place; it evokes emotion, offers insights, really lets you feel what it’s like to be immersed somewhere new. It might be written with humour, it could be poignant, or perhaps it charts the challenges faced during travel – but whatever the tone, it provides value to the reader. Whether you aim to inspire, inform, or entertain, travel writing is ultimately about connecting people to places through words.
What travel writing is NOT
It’s NOT just writing about your holiday abroad—it’s about finding a unique angle, a compelling story, or valuable information for your audience.
It’s NOT just for professional journalists or published authors—bloggers, content creators, and freelancers can all make a living in travel writing.
Types of Travel Writing
Just as in any area of work, there are many different types of travel writing and many different routes you can take to make a career as a travel writer. These are some of the key paths:
- Travel Journalism (Feature Writing & Essays)
There is a strong but competitive market for travel journalism, with writing for newspapers, magazines and online publications and websites all possible avenues to pursue. Here the focus is on compelling storytelling (often with an unusual or fresh angle), inspiring interviews and cultural insights.
Within travel journalism there are many specialist areas, for example: Food & Travel, Family Travel, Solo Travel, Adventure Travel, Green Travel, Luxury Travel – just to name a few.
To be successful in travel journalism, you need to be skilled in pitching editors and working with publications – so delivering quality copy to deadline and word count, and often if you can provide strong visuals too that will make you more attractive to editors, particularly when online has become so important. Your content might go into a print edition, but it will also often be repurposed online – this is where great photography and even videography can make a real difference.
Examples of Travel Journalism could be writing a feature on sustainable travel for National Geographic, or a feature on luxury train travel for CNTraveler, or an article on adventurous solo travel for Solo Travel or Wanderlust magazine.
2. Travel Blogging & Personal Travel Writing
Nowadays travel writing has become much more accessible with the advent of the internet and blogging. Anyone can set up their own website or blog and become a ‘travel writer’. The pros of this kind of travel writing include having the space and time to develop your own distinctive voice as a writer and the freedom to focus on whichever aspects of travel interest you most. It allows for personal storytelling without having to adhere to the needs of editors and house guidelines.
Travel Blogging also enables you to create multiple streams of income. You can make income through selling guides online, through subscriptions to a newsletter full of expert insights, or through ad revenue or affiliate marketing.
If you build a strong, loyal audience you can often attract sponsorship deals or collaborations.
Perhaps you prefer to share your personal travel writing through a newsletter. Solutions like Substack now make it easy for writers to share their travel writing (and visuals) while building up a targeted and loyal readership through newsletters – whether free content, part-subscription content or full subscription model. The more valuable the content, the better the opportunity to set up a subscription model – thereby potentially funding your writing. Or if you can develop a large, or specialist audience, you can attract sponsorship for your writing.
A great example of travel blogging is the website theblondeabroad.com – a highly successful travel blog site that has been developed by its founder into a dynamic travel business that provides expert advice to solo female travellers, even branching into providing luxury retreats for solo female travellers to unusual destinations, running a digital agency, and offering a travel shop. While being comprehensive in the content and value offered, the market niche is specific and tailored, helping the site to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
3. Travel Copywriting (Commercial & Branded Content)
Perhaps you have strong copywriting skills and prefer working in more of a team or client-based environment. In that case, travel copywriting can be a lucrative route into travel writing.
Tourism boards, hotels, airlines and travel brands all need copywriting expertise. If you can combine strong writing skills with knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) marketing, then that will be a real draw for companies seeking a copywriter.
As so much content is now online, understanding how to write copy that is SEO-calibrated (understanding the use of keywords, article length and so forth) to enable effective search result listings, is a valuable skill.
Being able to write persuasive copy wins over clients for your clients – whether you are providing destination guides, website copy, working on social media strategy or writing SEO articles. This can lead to longer-term contracts which can help bring stability to your monthly income. You also get paid directly by your clients, and this can have a quicker turnaround that always relying on publications.
Examples of travel copywriting include writing destination content for Airbnb, writing website content for a five star hotel chain or writing brochures for a yacht brokerage company.
4. Guidebook Writing
When I first started travelling, I would always buy a guidebook – whether Lonely Planet, Rough Guides or another guidebook. Back then there was no internet, no plethora of helpful websites, no TripAdvisor, no booking.com or airbnb.com – and if you wanted help to navigate a new location, these in-depth guides were essential.
Times have changed. Nowadays we are less likely to pack a door-stopper of a book in a rucksack to travel. The guides are becoming glossier, more visual, more design oriented. Yet they are still a highly valuable way to navigate new locations. Unlike travel blogs or websites, the writers aren’t picking places to stay or eat based on collaborations or sponsorships – they recommend the places they would stay or eat or visit. The guidebooks are concerned increasingly with ethical travel, green and sustainable travel recommendations – and this is important for many travellers.
As someone who has written for both Lonely Planet & DK Eyewitness Travel, I can share that guidebook writing requires a great deal of in-depth research, rigorous fact-checking and attention to detail, and the ability to work within a very specific editorial framework. It also requires flexibility, adaptability and often technical skills.
Guidebook writing can also lead into website content writing – Lonely Planet for example has a large travel website full of useful content for travellers.
Examples of guidebook writing could be contributing to a Singapore travel guide, acting as a coordinating author on a guide (bringing together the writing of several writers), or as the author of a travel guide to Ibiza.
5. Travel Vlogging & Content Creation
Many of us turn to YouTube or platforms like Instagram or TikTok when we are searching for travel inspiration. Want to hike the Camino de Santiago? Type in Camino de Santiago and dozens of video accounts are immediately available online on YouTube – see where to stay, what to expect, and experience the highs and lows alongside the intrepid storyteller.
If you enjoy visual storytelling and are technically competent in editing skills (or willing to learn), then travel vlogging can be a rewarding career path to take. You can build up a loyal and engaged audience who connect to you and your travels directly.
YouTube or platforms like Instagram are best considered like a billboard for your travel writing business. While you can monetise through ads, this requires extremely high and consistent levels of ‘eyeballs’ on your content and engagement with your channel. The same is true to a degree with brand deals and sponsorships – there will be a set of deliverables to be agreed, a framework to work within. With the right partnerships it can be lucrative, but you may not wish to overload your audience with paid content, or you may find you prefer to have more storytelling freedom.
Many YouTubers have found visual storytelling a satisfying way to share their adventures with a loyal following, while gaining income support through other channels such as Patreon or Subscription services. Some travel content creators will create additional content – User-generated content (UGC) that can be commissioned by brand partners – for example documenting a surf trip in a more ‘authentic’ way while advertising surf gear and clothes for the sponsoring brand.
TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts allow for shorter visual storytelling clips and can help build and drive audience to your other travel writing platforms.
Examples of successful Travel Vlogging include channels on digital nomad life like The Planet D (who started documenting their travels back in 2006) or YouTubers like Sailing La Vagabonde (initially a couple sailing the world, now a family documenting their sailing adventures and family travels).
6. Travel Photography & Multimedia Storytelling
Perhaps you love photography, and enjoy the combination of writing alongside photography. This can be an attractive skill set for many magazines or blogs. A great photographer can capture the essence of a place through visual storytelling and capturing details, in the same way a great travel writer can immerse a reader in a location.
By providing photography alongside your travel journalism, you can increase your income – selling the photographs, through licensing or through collaborations if offering multimedia storytelling to brands, companies or publications.
An example of travel photography and multimedia storytelling would be a photo essay featuring a remote archipelago in The Guardian, an off-the-beaten-track surf destination in Morocco for CNTraveler or a food and travel column for Food and Travel magazine.
As you are building your travel writing career, remember you don’t have to choose just one path! Many travel writers will combine these different travel writing areas to build multiple income streams, to create a varied travel writing portfolio and to keep developing their skills and range within the field of travel writing.