Travel trends and time pegs give your audience more of a reason to read your stories, now. Photo by: Rodrigo Soldon 2
Smart travel writing cover the “why now” questions asked by content gatekeepers and readers alike.
Why is this story important, now?
Why should I publish it in my magazine or on my site, now?
Why should I interrupt my busy day by spending time engaging with this content, now?
Time pegs help answer these questions. But beyond anniversaries, holidays, seasonal and recurring events, how can you incorporate time pegs into your articles?
By focusing on two things: Travel Trends and Emerging Destinations. We’ll explore up-and-coming places (and how they ascend) in future blog post, but today let’s dig into travel trends.
LEVERAGING TRAVEL TRENDS
By their nature, travelers seek new places to go and ways to experience destinations. Flip through the pages of travel magazines from recent years, and chances are you’ll see content on these topics:
- Voluntourism – Traveling somewhere to lend a hand, whether building houses on the US Gulf Coast or monitoring sea turtle migration in Costa Rica
- Learning Vacations – Cooking classes in Thailand, surfing lessons in Nicaragua, art history in Europe, coding courses in San Francisco
- Luxury Travel – High-end travel is recession-proof and driven by waves of the newly-minted wealthy joining the blueblood economy
- Sharing Economy – Sites like AirBnB & Uber are disrupting established travel markets, and becoming default options for many millennials and other travelers
- Fitness, Health & Wellness – Yoga retreats, ultramarathons, meditation retreats, spas and pampering
- Medical Travel – Combining a trip abroad with a medical procedure that’s cheaper than in your home country
- WWOOFing and Urban Farming – World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms offers tons of opportunities to stretch travel budgets by helping tend the crops; urban farming has taken root in America as “local” becomes the “new organic”
- Round-the-World Travel – Easier now than ever before, with an industry of RTW ticket brokers blanketing the globe
These travel trends are not temporary phenomena. They are here to stay.
As a travel writer, look at ways you can leverage these trends with your beat expertise in generating story ideas, and tie them into your topics of subject matter expertise.
Don’t forget to provide the essential “how-to” information to help readers embark on these trips themselves.
Travel trends are constantly evolving. Here are a few more recent trends in travel on the upswing, and worth exploring:
- Packaged Adventure – Parachuting in and out of a destination on niche, guided travel experiences. With limited time but more money, many travelers today are opting to pay for bundled experiences that are shorter in time, yet packed full with activities that are catered to their interests.
- Digital Nomad Economy – Laptop in hand, more travelers are hitting the road and working professional gigs from remote locations around the world. The rise of the professional gig economy helps foster the “coffee shop employee”, who can log in from around the world, and get paid a solid salary.
- Making Stuff – With the Maker Movement ushering in a new generation of hands-on tinkering, and a renaissance in small-scale manufacturing driven by new technology like 3D printers, a cottage industry of maker vacations has popped up. Those hungry for experience can roll up their sleeves and get to work crafting something that’s uniquely their own.
- Local & Craft Products – Whether they make stuff themselves or just shop for it, today’s travelers look to find more products unique to the places they visit. From food and drink to clothing, arts and furniture, locally-sourced small batches has become the new organic.
If you’re not sure how to find travel trends, just Google some search terms and you’ll get a bunch of source material. Input some word strings with names of your beats, plus keywords like “travel trend” or “new ways to travel 2016”, and see what pops up.
If Travel + Leisure, Lonely Planet, Buzzfeed or Mashable dubs something a travel trend, point to that in your pitch letters as proof your idea is spot on.
What travel trends can you focus on? Which new ways that people travel will become more popular in 2016?