Story: A credible and authentic story gives the product a social significance and content. I’ve recently started to discuss the fact that the best way to engage potential travellers into an experience is by immersing them into the ongoing story, narrated with all the artifacts of modern technologies (blogs, videos, photos, locals tweeting, etc). The more a person is exposed to the real thing before travel time, the more likely the experience will render the personal transformation expected instead of becoming a collection of awkward, unforeseen circumstances that kill spontaneity.

So in two simple steps, every destination should have the power of making you part of its story, and every great story needs great writers to adapt it for a given audience. That makes perfect sense to me.

My angle is all about the inspiration – helping people get inspired to get out of that armchair and book their next trip. So its more about bite-sized ideas for various places (although having said that our last interview about Mallorca was a long one…).

Sorry to hear you took some heat least week but I totally hear you – it doesn’t matter what your format at, just add some value and not just noise!

You’re exactly right. There is little value in “went to the Eiffel tower today. It was pretty,” which is still what I believe MOST travel blogs out there contain. I think educated readers manage to skip those and land on quality sites though.

-Jeff

The standard narrative blog, however, is – as you noted – rather basic and rudimentary. Little more than a public version of the quick e-mails and letters travelers might otherwise be ending to their friends and loved ones. These have a short shelf life, do little to capture the essence of the experience and offer relatively little value to other visitors planning a trip.