Launch Your Travel Writing Career

A travel writer’s path to success is paved with great story ideas. Unique perspectives and timely new takes on classic attractions appeal to travel editors and readers alike.

We’ve put together this page of activities and exercises to help travel writers brainstorm story ideas. Use the Story Idea Generator to:

• identify new article ideas
• ramp up site content
• break into new content verticals, like food or fitness
• test news ways of thinking about your beats and topics of subject matter expertise

And ultimately, to expand your travel content output, grow your brand and earn more!

Three Quick Thoughts

1. Rule One: No Wrong Answers! Turn off your internal editor when brainstorming. Collect ideas now, collate later.
2. Think about parallel markets: Food, fitness, technology, business, fashion, the arts.
3. A story is not just where you go – it’s how you experience a place

Five Ways to Create New Story Ideas

1) Take a Local Road Trip

To get the travel content ideas flowing, take off for a local getaway.

Head out on the weekend or for a mid-week road trip with your traveler’s eyes open. Follow a road famous or unfamiliar, try a new local activity, revisit a place that’s changed.

Go with a purpose in mind, like hiking, hitting the farmers markets, museum-hopping or taking a spa break. Or just pick a route and see what’s around the corner.

Wherever you live, you can find plenty of local travel story ideas

All places have great attractions, highlights, oddities and unique activities. Brainstorm ideas by:

• Thinking about what’s best or special about your area for travelers, and locals
  
• Focusing on how people travel – not just where.

That second point is worth highlighting, because in many cases the essence of a great travel story is in the experience it captures – the “how.” How you intersect with a destination is what makes your story unique.

If you’re not sure what to cover locally, get into the traveler’s mindset with these tips and tricks:

Get the Guides:

• Grab a few travel guidebooks and start flipping through. Try titles from major publishers like “Lonely Planet Florida & the South’s Best Trips” and niche publications to match your interests, such as “Hidden Mickeys” or “Birds of Florida Field Guide.”

Search Long-Tail Google Keywords:

• Play around with some Google keyword searches for ways people travel in your area and elsewhere. Enter in specific strings for your region: “Best Outdoor Activities in the Great Lakes,” “Best Boston Clam Chowder Recipes”, “Weird Travel in the American Southwest.” Look for patterns and see what travel trends pop up.

Canvas your network:

• What’s popular locally? What in your area do your people most want to see, now? How would your friends explore your region? Ask your blog readers, Facebook friends or Twitter followers for feedback about what they’d like to read about and then give your people what they want.

4) Hit the road on a once-a-month local travel trip!

By focusing on “how” people travel, you’ll find a rich tapestry of specific story ideas.

Hit the road for story idea inspiration.

2) Mine Your Experiences

Everybody has had intriguing life experiences. Look back at your unique life path and see how you can tie your experiences into destination and activity bests..

For example, I grew up outside New York City and spent five years in Austin before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Along the way I taught English in Korea, slopped fish in Alaska, backpacked across Europe and traveled to 45 states.

I’ve written about places from Paris to Amsterdam, California to Nicaragua. I worked at Lonely Planet for seven years, developing travel titles including guidebooks to NYC and New Orleans.

I can mine any of these experiences for story ideas, and have on-topic published clips to show potential editors.

Think about your path when identifying fields of expertise:

• Ever spent a year abroad studying, or three months backpacking Central America or Southeast Asia?
• Rented an AirBnB property, or an Airstream trailer, or a paddleboard?
• What’s the most memorable summer job you’ve held?
• Any great family vacation memories of a cabin by the lake or a week at the beach?

Though experiences like these, you’ve gained first-hand perspectives, and learned the how-to information that’s valued by readers and travel editors.

Share your knowledge by including step-by-step instructions in your travel articles, in sidebars or bulleted lists.

By passing along advice on topics like renting an apartment in Paris or finding a ski resort job, you provide added value to your readers who can trust in your advice.

Mine your experiences, make your passions your beats, and then make it a point to own those beats. Apply what you love to do to your travel writing and the story ideas will follow:

Rock Climber?

• Pitch a Southwestern climbing road trip piece from Utah to Big Bend National Park. Check out how parks like Grand Teton and Joshua Tree are being impacted by climate change
• Keep up with the latest gear updates and training techniques
• Follow issues in the sport – such as the conflict between climbers and conservationists over permanent anchors or the impacts of global warming

Love to travel and cook?

• Focus story ideas on culinary travel. Pitch ideas like a best Memphis BBQ roundup, Top 5 Vietnamese street foods, plank salmon cooking in British Columbia or a trip to Jamaica for perfect jerk chicken
• Include how-to info for readers to try at home
• Trace the origin of a family recipe to its old country roots

Passion for fashion?

• Annual events like Fashion Week in New York, London or Paris provide annual reasons to write travel style pieces or roundups of fashionable areas
• Focus on designers and clothing boutiques in trendsetting neighborhoods the London’s East End and Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.
• Think about accessories — shoes, bags, jewelry

Fitness Buff?

• Activity-specific magazines cover the sports spectrum: winter sports, water sports, running, climbing, backpacking, baseball, world soccer
• More and more people are traveling for fitness events, like Team in Training marathons, distance bike rides, Tough Mudder endurance challenges, triathlons and ultramarathons
• Any travel destination has a fitness angle, from a quick escape for a lunch workout to a nearby place to hike

Hands-On, Crafty, Always Tinkering With Projects?

• Check out the Maker Faire phenomenon, which has spread to more than 100 locations globally
• Write about area flea markets, local crafters, antiques road trips and camping hacks
• Explore museums of science and technology, space centers and planetariums, and museums of arts and crafts, all enjoying well-deserved upswings in popularity

Live Music?

• It’s a golden age for music festivals, which keep cropping up to more and more avid fans
• Heritage music travel to places like Liverpool or though the Mississippi Delta on (Blues) Highway 61
• Storytelling of musical history at storied venues and neighborhoods, like the Apollo Theatre, Preservation Hall, south Chicago blues clubs or the Sunset Strip

Remember: All of these story ideas can be pitched to non-travel markets too.

3) Include Time Pegs

When scanning travel content, editors and readers want to know:

Why is this piece relevant to me, now?

Time pegs answer that all-important “why now” question.

By including time pegs — anniversaries, events, seasonal angles — you’ll give readers an added reason to engage with your story, rather than clicking away or turning the page.

You’ll also stand out to editors, who get plenty of pitches *without* time pegs.

A timely angle in a pitch can be the difference between landing a travel assignment, and being a runner-up.

Time pegs come in varying forms:

Anniversaries and Key Dates

• Centennial celebrations (eg 2018 marks 100 years since the end of World War I)
• Birthdays of famous people (eg Nelson Mandela, born in 1918)
• Notable anniversaries (50 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Grand Limited-Time Events

• Olympics Games, FIFA World Cup
• European City of Culture
• Events and titles that pass from host country/city to host

Annual Magnet Events

• Festivals (Sundance Film Festival, Glastonbury)
• Pop Cultural Gatherings (Comic-Con International, South by Southwest)
• Sports (spring training baseball, World Series of Poker)

Seasonality 

• Winter whale watching
• Spring in Europe
• September grape harvesting
• Regional holiday menus

Openings / Reopenings / Rebrandings:

• Victoria & Albert Museum in London, renovated in 2017
• Rise of legalized marijuana in the American west, and its impact on tourism
• New Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, opened in 2017

Anniversaries, events, re-openings, birthdays and seasonality all lend urgency to your story by making it about somewhere to go, now.

You’re competing with so many other sources for a reader’s attention, so add time pegs to provide readers more value, and stand out.

When thinking about story ideas, look at ways to attach time pegs to your destination and activity beats.

Use shoulder season or low-season travel as time pegs.

• Austin and New Orleans draw huge crowds for South By Southwest and Jazz Fest each spring, so cover fall events like Austin City Limits Festival or Voodoo Festival.
• Try Europe in winter, when its colder, but cheaper, much less crowded and quite romantic around Valentine’s Day.

Apply time pegs to your topic beats

• if you cover travel gear and technology, you’ll have a steady schedule of time-specific content opportunities tied into annual product line launches and new release dates, not to mention an annual January trip to Las Vegas for the CES Consumer Electronics Show.
  
• Focus on culinary travel and you can write foodie road trip pieces about fruit stands in spring, or heirloom tomatoes in fall.
• Activities writers can use annual events like the Tour du France or X-Games as time hooks for destination or activities pieces

Use Wikipedia to find upcoming time pegs. Take a year like 2018, and go back in increments of five years. Look for key years like 1918 and noteworthy anniversaries like 25 years (1993).

Here are some potential time pegs for the upcoming few years:

• 2017 – Canada 150, 40th anniversary of release of Star Wars, 10th anniversary of the iPhone
• 2018 – Olympic Winter Games, South Korea, Commonwealth Games, Australia
• 2019 – 100th anniversary of the creation of Grand Canyon National Park, 50th anniversary of the moon landing
• 2020 – Olympic Summer Games, Tokyo, 25th anniversary of Balkans War cease fire
• 2021 – Irish free state created, 1921, 200th birthday of Louis Vuitton

Tip: Start a time pegs spreadsheet to help plan your editorial calendar. Use it to capture key dates (holidays, anniversaries), annual attractions and seasonal events for your destinations. Filter this by month or year to schedule articles and pitches.

Check news, entertainment and sports for time pegs.

• The 50^th anniversary of a beloved book, movie or record can make a reason to revisit a setting like Sun Studios or Monument Valley.
• The Oscars and Tony Awards are annual hooks for travel pieces on LA and Broadway
• Every four years, the U.S. Presidential election provides a time peg for Washington, D.C. pieces, plus a halo effect for the winner’s home base.
• By their nature, time pegs come back around. They also provide a great anchor for going back to a place. If you spent a year abroad in Paris, revisit it 5, 10 or 20 years later.

Being able to anticipate what’s on the horizon for your destinations is another way to stand out.

Think about how places are changing, cover them while they’re in transition, and then revisit them and report back.

Time pegs add urgency and give a readers a reason to visit a destination, now

4) Stay Atop Travel Trends

Survey the travel content landscape from the past few years, and chances are you’ll see content on these topics:

How People Are Traveling

• With Mobile Devices:  Reports have mobile booking now accounting for 40% of total travel bookings. The pervasiveness of travelers with mobile devices has helped last-minute bookings sites like Booking.com and HotelTonight.
• Using the Sharing Economy: Sites like AirBnB & Uber are challenging entrenched interests in travel markets by creating new platforms that have been rapidly adopted by travelers, while governments are wondering how to regulate best for all parties.
• Luxury Travel: High-end travel is recession-proof and driven by waves of the newly-minted wealthy joining the blue-blood economy.
• Round-the-world travel: It’s easier now than ever before, with an industry of Round-the-World ticket brokers and plenty of travel hackers who’ll show you how to game the system.

What People Are Doing

• Voluntourism: Traveling somewhere to lend a hand, whether monitoring sea turtles in Costa Rica, building schools in Indonesia or restoring a barn in France.
• Adventure Travel: Trekking, rafting, cycling, climbing, surfing, safaris, triathlons.
• Medical Travel: Combining a trip abroad with a medical procedure that’s cheaper in another country.
• Learning Vacations: cooking classes in Thailand, art history in Europe, sailing lessons in the Florida Keys
• Festival & Event Travel: Organizers have proven that if they build great events, people will come. International festivals and fan gatherings abound from Lollapalooza to  Glastonbury, Sundance Film Festival to Comic-Con International
• Health & Wellness: Yoga retreats, meditation workshops, spas, pampering

All of these trends provide solid hooks for travel story ideas, and opportunities to provide that essential “how-to” information to help readers embark on trips themselves.

5) Emerging Destinations

Borders open, exchange rates fall, hipsters arrive, pop culture takes note. Places bubble up the the top of “Go There” lists for all sorts of reasons.

Emerging destinations are any that are at the doorstep of greater awareness among travelers and others – the kinds of places to go see, now.

By focusing on up-and-coming destinations, you tap into an active audience of front-line travelers, and create opportunities to establish yourself as an expert on places growing in popular awareness.

Take a look back at how places emerged in popularity over the past two decades:

• 2000 – In the 2000s, Argentina, Croatia and New Zealand broke through because of a currency crash, peace treaty and “The Lord of the Rings,” respectively.
• 2005 – Brooklyn took off, China was the future, rebuilding New Orleans sparked a surge in voluntourism
• 2010 – Spain and Vancouver saw success on the sporting stage; India and Italy became centers to Eat, Pray and Love.
• 2015 – The 2014 World Cup created a “halo effect” that continues to drive travelers to South American destinations like Argentina, Colombia and Brazil – not to mention Cup champion Germany.

Keep an eye on the news cycle for happenings that may change the popularity calculus, and pitch ideas accordingly.

When brainstorming story ideas, consider places in transition.

• Cuba, opening up to U.S. tourism
• Dubai, readying to launch massive Al Maktoum Airport
• Nicaragua, embarking on the $50 billion Nicaragua Inter-Ocean Canal
• Detroit, rebounding from bankruptcy and financial collapse
• Greece, recovering from the 2014 debt crisis
• Queens, recently ranked atop the Lonely Planet Best in the USA travel list

Districts and neighborhoods can emerge quickly too, and make for great new takes on evergreen destinations like Paris and San Francisco.

Take a forward-looking view of your beats, and project how they may evolve going forward. I wrote about downtown Los Angeles and the High Line District of lower Manhattan while they were in development phases, and can always return to those places to compare then and now.

Crowds now flock to the High Line, the former elevated railway-turned-publc park in NYC.

6) The Zeitgeist & Two Separate Sources

Finally, story ideas are everywhere if you look to tap into the “zeitgeist,” or, simply the “buzz” of the moment.

Take a new look at evergreen destinations through the lens of cultural movements.

For example, in 2017, San Francisco is the center of the tech universe, with the benefits and challenges that presents the city.

In the mid-2000s, Brooklyn welcomed waves of priced-out Manhattanites, and grew to symbolize urban homesteading, backyard farming, bluegrass and big beards. Austin in the 1990s was the “next big thing.”

Each of these destinations has ample content for travel story ideas in general, but focusing on the buzz or the zeitgeist, you add more reason for editors and readers to want to know more, now.

One trick I use to sniff out trends or the zeitgeist is the “two separate sources” rule.

Simply, if you hear about a place or activity from two different, unconnected sources within a short time frame, that’s a good sign that the place or activity is growing in travel awareness.

If you see a story about retro Palm Springs in a magazine and then hear a friend say they’re taking a long weekend there, that’s a sign that there’s interest in that area.

We share common experiences more than ever in the digital age, yet still people strive to connect. By capturing the buzz of “now” in your travel writing, you’ll reach a captive audience.

And don’t forget – as a travel writer, you, too, are in the position to help set travel trends.