Travel blogging is filled with intolerable characters. There were a few years ago when all that was available for a travel blogger was single, traveling around Europe and dating a successful and well-known travel blogger (that shall remain nameless). Not any more. The travel industry has changed tremendously since then. Competition is much greater, prices have gone down, and sites that used to be attractive to the young, enterprising young travel blogger are now, instead, appealing to a much older, more mature, professional travel blogger.
One of the most important things any travel blogger needs to succeed at is travel insurance. If you have ever made a trip to an overseas country and had to pay for medical treatment or get an emergency visa it probably ruined your holiday. If you made a good holiday to some place like Thailand, you would never dream of going back to get treated for fungal infections you contracted from swimming in raw salt water. Now imagine if you had gotten that same trip back five years ago. You might have had a different opinion on how to treat your first case of fungal infection. That’s how bad travel insurance is these days.
This doesn’t mean that every travel blog author these days has to start writing about cathedrals and Latin Quarter rituals. A lot of them still love writing about beaches, what restaurants are the best in the world or how to get your kid to say “mamma” in Spanish. They just can’t seem to part with their enthusiasm for social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
The majority of travel blogs are, instead, epics of someone’s life, told from the perspective of the travel writer who has made frequent trips to the places in question. Stories about trips to Myrtle Beach, Costa Rica, Paris, or London aren’t interesting to a guy who makes ten trips a year to the Caribbean but it would make life easier for him if he wrote about stuff he did in his hometown. If he had more friends in his city, he might be able to pitch more business opportunities to them. That’s why he’s using social media sites to get people to read his blogs. The more people who click on his links, the more he makes.
It might be tough for a travel blogger to talk about stuff that most people would find interesting if they could actually go and see it. After all, how many of us actually have passports these days? Nevertheless, it’s important to make people think twice about the big travel plans they’re making for their lives whenever they bring their kids with them.
A large percentage of travel blogger’s life is spent at airports and hotels. When they tell their audience how much they hate having to deal with the formalities involved with getting a visa, they might get a few laughs. But the fact is that people ask for such details in the first place. It’s part of the whole scam to make sure that they can take as much stuff home as they can before leaving.
As travel bloggers, it’s our duty to tell people about the ups and downs of life. This means that we have to constantly struggle with the social media world. If you want to keep your content interesting, it helps a lot if you take a break once in a while. Even if you’re tempted to click off your account to log onto some other social media site, just take a look at your stats and see how many people are actually logging in from your recent trips. You’ll know when you’re getting too boring!
One of the most common complaints among travel bloggers is that they feel they’re being used by the travel insurance companies. A lot of them write about getting a refund from travel insurance because they got tricked into paying for something that wasn’t covered. Travel companies use these blogs to promote their own products, so they’re quick to attack the ones that they don’t like. Yet this is exactly why you should use social media. Instead of going on a vicious attack against your employer or complaining to your friends about a bad experience, you should take a good look at your travel insurance options. This is a great time to sign up for a travel blog with an existing network so that you can get regular updates from your readers.
