Lonely Planet maps the future: a conversation with CEO Matt Goldberg

by Don George on

Matt Goldberg joined Lonely Planet as CEO in March 2009. Before joining Lonely Planet, he was senior vice president of digital strategy and operations for Dow Jones & Company in New York, where his responsibilities included leading business operations for The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. I spoke with him in November.

DG: Why did you move to Lonely Planet?

MG: First of all, to be selected to lead a company that was so important to me personally in my own travels and that plays such an important and meaningful role in the world by encouraging and empowering people to go out and experience the world, was nothing short of humbling. When I pinched myself and realized that I received the offer, there was no question in my mind that I would sell my house in the worst economic climate in history, pull my children out of school, and move 12,000 miles away — because to my mind, there is no company more deserving of its reputation than Lonely Planet. It’s going through an incredible period, like any content company in any category, and I’m passionate about one question: How do esteemed media brands, products and services make the successful transition through this period of extraordinary technological innovation? I have spent my career thinking about that question, and I am putting all of my energy into helping Lonely Planet make that transition successfully.

DG: Has your sense of Lonely Planet’s challenges evolved very dramatically since you joined the company?MG: Well, certainly you don’t really know until you become operational on a day-to-day basis what the challenges and opportunities are going to be. I have to say that I’ve been impressed with the number of opportunities. Our core publishing business remains profitable. And while the guidebook market as a whole has decreased, Lonely Planet has continued to invest in new products and really tried to drive innovation and new ways of working so that not only can we remain number one in the world in that core business, but we can extend our lead and grow share, which is what we’ve done in 33 out of the last 34 months.

DG: What would you say are the major innovations that Lonely Planet has introduced since you’ve been there?

MG: Lonely Planet has long thought is there a way of changing the way we gather, manage, access, and distribute content so that we can be more platform agnostic. We’ve finally cracked the code on that one and made the investment over the last 18 months where we can send an author into the field, give them the tools through a mobile device to upload their work immediately onto a platform that’s totally dynamic and can immediately be useful, whether we’re producing a book or programming a web site or delivering a digital app through a mobile channel or a tablet PC. I knew this was real when we introduced what we were doing to our authors, and we had Tony Wheeler sitting in a café in Melbourne actually using this technology to show how we could change the product in real time.

We now have the opportunity to organize ourselves as a business around that technology and be totally product development focused and serving travelers in a way that they’re already signaling to us they’re going to want to leverage our content in the future.

DG: How does this impact the traditional guidebook? You have a print book that was published let’s say a year ago. You have a user who bought it last month and they’re in the destination now. Are they able to access updated restaurant and hotel information, for example? How do you integrate what they have in their hand as the print product and the new information that has become available since that book was published?

MG: We continue to believe in the future of the book as a technology. It’s over 5 centuries old and has features that continue to remain valuable and useful to users today. We know that the future of the book is all about emerging form factors, the way that that book integrates with digital platforms, and the way that we as publishers sit in the middle of the content production process and offer useful curation and services. We’re spending a lot of time thinking about the integration of physical and digital products. . I think there are opportunities in the future that Lonely Planet will be best positioned to deliver. You can imagine using your Smartphone and taking a snapshot of an image in a book and that triggers the download of the freshest content onto your mobile device, which enables you to then leave the book in the hotel and use that mobile device to create a mashup with maps to navigate your experience in the destination. That future is here now and we are experimenting on those kinds of things. We will bring products and services to market that we think consumers will pull through.

DG: To my mind there are two intersections of challenges in guidebook publishing. One is the chronological challenge of when the research is done, when the book is written, when the book is printed, and when it gets onto bookstore shelves, which you’ve just addressed. The second is the emerging challenge of the whole expert vs. crowd-sourcing issue. How is Lonely Planet navigating that second challenge?

MG: We still believe in the value of expertise and we are totally committed to the partnership we have with our freelance authors. We also recognize the value of our community, because you only have to go on Thorn Tree to see how rich the dialogue there is, even on a very early web platform. And there’s no doubt that crowd-sourcing also has its place. So I think the question is to identify when each of those sources is most useful. Expertise is really helpful when you’re trying to sift through the noise – when you’re trying to offer a curated experience, when you’re trying to make trusted editorial selections and informed judgments. A community is really useful when you’re trying to get up-to-date questions answered. Crowd sourcing may be really useful for commodity content which you don’t want to spend trouble and effort to get, like a phone number, opening and closing hours, or an address. I think it’s our job as a company that brings all this together to determine which is most useful when. What I say to our authors is that I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be a content producer, as long as you embrace the 21st-century technologies and tools that are available.

DG: That leads to my next question: There’s the iconic traditional LP author who ventured out into the middle of nowhere and wrote the first books and then rewrote those books, and then there’s this emerging 21st-century person who’s agile with a video camera and an iPhone and is very technologically savvy. How much overlap is there between those two schools of authors?

MG: We’re learning that now, in the moment. And I’d just say that I’ve been impressed with the author body as a whole and their desire to embrace new ways of working. We recognize that we need to find ways to leverage the strengths of all our authors that we rate highly, and different authors will bring different skills to the table. Our job is to understand that and to do a good job mapping skill sets, capabilities and desires with products of the future that we’ll need. We will continue to need guidebooks in the future, just as we’ll need really creative mobile apps and interactive products and services. So I think there’s more room than ever for lots of different people to be engaged with content production and development at Lonely Planet.

DG: In my association with Lonely Planet there have always been two cultural challenges. On the one hand, there’s an Old LP mentality and a New LP mentality. And on the other hand, there’s an Australian mentality, an English mentality, and an American mentality. How do you as an American living in Australia, new to Lonely Planet but as someone who’s been using it for many years – how are you working with those challenges and bridging those cultural divides?

MG: Let me first say by way of context that it’s clear to me that Lonely Planet as an idea, and what it stands for at its heart, is bigger than any subculture or individual. It’s bigger than its founders. Lonely Planet is the way that we all connected to this thing that empowered us to have a remarkable individual experience. I had that first experience in 1994: I was in my mid-20s and I went away to Australia on my own. I didn’t know a single soul there and the first thing I did was to get that Lonely Planet guide. It was under my arm everywhere I went for that year and a half. It introduced me to places and people that I wouldn’t have otherwise had the idea to go meet. Ultimately it transformed me in some way. Everybody that connects with Lonely Planet – and we know there are hundreds of millions of them – has an experience like that one that they will never forget.

We stand for a broad idea that we can all believe in — travel. We can all connect to it very differently. Matt Goldberg who lived in New York and was working for the Wall Street Journal connects with it as deeply and meaningfully as Errol Hunt from New Zealand who has been an LP commissioning editor for many years and who has capabilities very different from my own on the editorial side. We both connect to travel just as deeply even though we come from two totally different worlds.

So I think if we stay true to that, you can bring this company together around a singular vision to produce amazing guides across all platforms – whether they be books, online, mobile devices — and in all geographies, whether in the English-speaking world or in any one of the other geographies that we’re excited about.

DG: What are your goals for the company in 2011?

MG: Our goals for the company are ambitious. We want to continue to support our core business and propel it forward through new product innovation and technology-enabled growth. We want to continue to experiment restlessly with new technologies and new platforms and serve new audiences that we know, when they find us, on whatever device, in whatever country, will love us because we share the same mindset. We want to focus on some new geographies, expand our relationships in China, enter the India market, and continue on our relentless pace expanding our share in the US; ultimately, we want to be the leader in the US. And finally, we want to work effectively with our shareholder, BBC Worldwide, to leverage their skill and expertise in areas where they can help us get going, like the magazine, which has been very successful, like television, where we’re making a real effort, like adjacencies that might take us into new spaces. They have shown their willingness to invest and their commitment to allow Lonely Planet to thrive based on its proud tradition. We need to continue to take advantage of that.

DG: What has been the greatest lesson that you’ve learned so far?

MG: Every media company in the world is playing in a landscape that’s as dynamic as we’ve ever seen. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the pace of change is just increasing. The start-ups with easy access to capital, with open platforms where they can innovate rapidly and eat your lunch, with very few barriers to entry, have never been more dynamic. The lesson is that it’s hard to make this transition and follow consumers and be there where the innovators are. It’s going to take time and we need as leaders in these kinds of businesses to be bold, thoughtful, and patient. I’m only a year and a half in and of course I’d like to run really, really fast, and I think we need to be thoughtful about where we make our investments, how we mitigate risk, and how we ensure that we’re innovating and experimenting restlessly. I think that’s a lesson for not just Lonely Planet but anyone who’s working in this dynamic media space.

DG: Have the metrics of success changed in the time you’ve been at Lonely Planet because it’s such a dynamic industry?

MG: When you are innovating in your business, you can’t hold your innovation activity to the same standard of success or metrics as you hold your core business. You actually have to look at it differently. You need to give innovation more room to breathe, you need to allow failure to happen and develop that and kill ideas that aren’t getting pick-up. You have to seed early success, put additional resource into successful ventures and iterate rapidly, following the consumer or traveler along the way, because the consumer ultimately will tell you if you’ve been successful because they’ll be engaged with the product, which will ultimately yield revenue growth and profitability. But it is important to differentiate. So my answer is that in our core business, our success metrics haven’t changed that much. Where things have changed is how we think about the innovation, the emerging areas of our business. We’ve had both success and failure. But I’m very proud of our successes, including more than 5 million downloads of our mobile apps in the iPhone apps store. [Update: Lonely Planet just passed 7 million uploads as of early January 2011.]

We have been at the absolute forefront of technology as it relates to travel, starting with our app for the Beijing Olympics, when we introduced a Mandarin translation guide as a launch partner with Apple, continuing to our city guides, to being the first augmented reality travel app for the Android platform, to being the leader in the travel space for e-books across all platforms, from Kindle, where we were a global launch partner, through to iPad, where we were a launch partner for a completely new type of travel ebook for our Discover series that had touchscreen, color, and 3000 hyperlinks enabled, to most recently being a launch partner for NookColor. So we continue to invest in innovation.

And I have to say that I recognize that is the Lonely Planet DNA, going back to Tony Wheeler putting together a rudimentary desktop publishing system before it was recognized that that was the future, to that early web site and Thorn Tree and the way we engaged travelers to get user-generated information before anyone ever said UGC, to putting mobile apps out on the Palm Pilot in the 1990s. So I recognize that we are carrying on a proud tradition that really started with the people whose shoulders we stand on.

Merry Christmas from Lonely Planet: 13 free iPhone city guides

by Scott Carmichael on

Lonely Planet just unwrapped an early Christmas present for us all – 13 of their popular iPhone city guides went from $9.99 to $0. The guides are on sale until 1PM December 23rd, so grab them while you can – and remember, even if you don’t need them right away, once purchased, you’ll always have access to them for free.

Here are the 13 guides (iTunes store links):

This is the second time they’ve made the iPhone guides free – last time was to help stranded passengers during the volcanic eruptions in Europe. And don’t think that Lonely Planet forgot about Android users – the Android versions of these apps dropped to 99 cents. Not quite free, but still very generous!

Book review: A Moveable Feast

by Jeremy Kressmann on

When did the words travel and food become one and the same? These days, food tourism has worked its way to the tip of every well-heeled traveler’s tongue, whether it’s a search for Hong Kong’s best wonton noodles on foodie-travel favorite website Chowhound or the neverending food voyeurism of Travel Channel favorites Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern. It’s at exactly this zenith of food-focused travel that Lonely Planet has released A Moveable Feast, the latest entry in the guidebook publisher’s growing library of travel-focused literature.

A Moveable Feast, which came out this past October, represents a curated banquet of 38 “life-changing food adventures” from around the world. The anthology was curated by well-known Lonely Planet editor Don George (full disclosure: Don is Features Editor for Gadling) and includes an appetizer of food-related tales by well-known travel writers including Pico Iyer, Mark Kurlansky and (of course) Anthony Bourdain. There’s a little bit of everything featured in these 38 deliciously entertaining tales, from a love letter to French food by Andrew Zimmern to tales of eating dog in Korea by well-known travel scribe Simon Winchester. We even get a food story by Gadling’s own Sean McLachlan.

What’s the verdict on A Moveable Feast? It’s a fun, easily digestible collection of food-focused tales. Ultimately, reading A Moveable Feast is a lot like the typical Italian or French meal the book’s storytellers might reference: it aspires to be simply what it is. The ingredients will be of the utmost quality, and you will savor the details: the amusing anecdotes, the well-written prose and the vibrant descriptions. All in all, a collection of stories that is at once nourishing and entertaining – the perfect fuel for any food-loving traveler.

“The Tourist”: Is it worth the trip?

by Don George on

At the beginning of the new movie “The Tourist,” a mild-mannered American schoolteacher is sitting alone on a train from Paris to Venice. A mysterious and beautiful English woman approaches him, sits in the open seat across from him, and engages him in conversation. Soon they’re drinking wine and flirting over an elegant dinner on the train.

When they arrive in Venice, they are briefly separated, but when the teacher is poring over a map near St Mark’s Square, the beauty pulls up in a sleek motorboat and whisks him off to the Doge’s Suite at the five-star Hotel Danieli, where they end up in a long kiss.

This so closely resembled my own first experience as a tourist in Europe that I thought the movie was a documentary. But then I realized that in this version there were no pigeons in St. Mark’s Square. Now that’s bending the truth a bit too far.

****

I had been excited to see this movie. I’m a big fan of Johnny Depp, and Angelina Jolie is, well, Lara Croft incarnate, and the movie was shot on location in Paris and Venice – the geographical equivalents of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. So how could this movie not be smoking hot?

I also thought that a movie with the title “The Tourist” might provide some interesting perspective on that old-as-Venice debate about the difference between a traveler and a tourist.

Well, movie-viewing is like traveling. Sometimes you look at the brochures and the postcards and you arrive thinking, “This place is going to be unbelievable.” And it turns out to be unbelievable – but in the wrong way. That’s how it was with me and this movie: I felt like a duped tourist at “The Tourist.”

The plot was contrived and implausible, and the actors just seemed to be going through the motions – there was none of the passion-spark that ignites a new infatuation, whether with a person or with a place.

But let me tell you what I did like about the film: Venice. (Paris, I should note, played just a cameo role in the first 15 minutes of the film.) Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmark presented Venice in the same way that he presented Angelina Jolie: with long, lingering, loving shots. After a while, this didn’t work so well for Ms. Jolie, but Venice handled this treatment superbly, the old pastel buildings reflected in lapping canals, the ceaseless water traffic of gondolas, taxi-boats and barges passing elegantly sculpted facades, the terra-cotta roof-tiles, shadowy side-streets, voluptuous bridges and romantic terraces. Venice at dawn and at dusk, at noon and midnight – we got to revel in a variety of Venetian moods, all of them glorious.

Of course, one could quibble. Like it or not, Venice smells, and the Venice in “The Tourist” looked antiseptic, deodorized. Similarly, the city was less littered and crumbling than the Venice I love, and certainly less pigeoned, and while there were a couple of promising chase scenes, the plot didn’t allow the film-makers to get lost in the intricate and beguiling back-alleys of the city, where its real magic blooms. (Come to think of it, the plot didn’t allow us to get lost in the characters’ back-alleys, either – a real shame.)

But still, in addition to the majestic Danieli and elegant St. Mark’s, the film offered a sumptuous selection of Venetian sights, including the incomparable Grand Canal itself, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum and its alluring canal-level terrace in the Dorsoduro district, the workaday Rialto Fish Market near the Campo de la Becarie, and the peaceful, mostly residential island of Giudecca – a particularly rewarding off-the-beaten-path stop for real tourists.

Which reminds me of one new ripple in that old tourist vs. traveler tempest: I was delighted to discover that STA Travel has a prominent advertisement on the movie’s official home page proclaiming, “Visit STA Travel to find trips to experience Italy like a true tourist!” I can’t recall any other time when experiencing somewhere “like a true tourist” has been touted as so exciting!

Is “The Tourist” worth the ticket? Well, as a cinematic traveler, I didn’t get to see the Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie I had been hoping to see, but I did get to savor La Serenissima in wide-screen splendor for an hour and a half, and that was a real trip.

Grantourismo blogger on guidebooks and travel writing

by Meg Nesterov on

Last week I posted a Q & A with blogger Lara Dunston and her husband and partner Terence Carter about their travel project and blog Grantourismo. In addition to good advice about renting a vacation apartment and getting “under the skin” of a place when traveling, they had a lot of interesting things to say about guidebooks, both from their experiences writing them and how they see travelers using them wrong.

Read on for more on the guidebook writing process, how you can use them best on vacation, the changing media landscape, and which bloggers and publications offer the best content for travelers.How did this project stem from your experiences as travel writers?
Grantourismo began as a personal travel project that developed from our frustrations, firstly, with our own work as travel writers, and secondly, with how many travelers rely so much on guidebooks. Terence and I wrote, updated or contributed to around 50 guidebooks for Lonely Planet, Footprints, Rough Guides, DK, and others, and what we loved most about guidebook writing was when we worked on a city guide and rented an apartment for a month or two and really got beneath the skin of the place.

So many writers who aren’t residents of a place ‘parachute in’ to a destination for a few weeks and do crazy 18-hour days ticking off sights/bars/restaurants etc in a frenzy and leave. We didn’t start travel writing to live like that. However, what we disliked was the tedious stuff – ensuring the post office was in the right spot on the map, checking bus timetables, etc. We’d also been doing lots of feature writing, especially profiles, for magazines and newspapers, and what we loved about that was experiencing places through their people.

What’s the difference between guidebook and feature writing?

With guidebooks, unless Terence had a photography commission for the same book we were writing, we mostly traveled anonymously. As feature writers we could contact people, doors would open, and we’d have incredible experiences, and come away feeling like we’d really learnt something. For instance, for a story on Michelin-star chef Pierre Gagnaire’s Dubai restaurant, we spent a night in the kitchen, Terence cooking and me observing and notetaking and – Terence ended up cooking a dish for Pierre! Grantourismo was an attempt to develop a project that would give us the opportunity to have more of those kinds of experiences and have the best of both worlds, of guidebook and feature writing. We also wanted to inspire travelers to travel in the same way, to engage more with locals and explore their own interests when they travel. This desire grew out of a frustration with seeing how obsessed people were with their guidebooks and witnessing travellers miss out on amazing opportunities because they would only go to places their guidebooks recommended.

I’ll never forget going to a great little stand-up seafood tapas place in Barcelona and seeing a young American couple sitting on the doorstop next door frantically trying to figure out if it was in the guidebook. The place was heaving and it was full of locals! Just go in! There’s also another famous tapas bar in Barcelona which once had a great reputation but it fairly mediocre now but because it’s in every guidebook, people line up for it an hour before it opens. Yet there are 20 other better tapas bars in the surrounding streets! We’d rather see people leave their guidebooks closed occasionally, talk to locals more and pursue their interests. If you’re passionate about food and cooking, why not go to a place and do a cooking course, stay in a vacation rental and shop at the markets and cook? If you love a restaurant get tips on where to eat from the waiter, and if the restaurant is quiet, why not ask to see the kitchen and chat to the chef?

So can travelers still rely on guidebooks for basic info?
Guidebooks are great for background information on a wide variety of topics on a place. What’s the alternative? Lugging around half a dozen books on the history, politics, geography, culture etc of the destination? Or load those books onto a Kindle or iPad, although of course not all travelers can afford hi-tech gadgets or even want to take them to some destinations. The ‘front/back matter’ in guidebooks can usually be relied upon – sometimes the stuff is written by subject experts, or it’s written by authors who do a great deal of research, it’s fact-checked, and it doesn’t date quickly.

Where guidebooks can be unreliable on the other hand is in the perishable information – reviews of hotels, restaurants, shops, cafés, bars, their addresses, phone numbers, prices, opening times etc. It’s not necessarily the author’s fault. Businesses move or close down, things change. It’s the fault of the publisher and their long production schedules – sometimes a year or 18 months can pass from the time the author has done the research to the time the books hit the shops. Some places never change or change little, like small country towns, but cities like Shanghai or Dubai change constantly.

We once worked on a first edition guidebook that took two years from the time I submitted the manuscript and Terence submitted the photos to reaching the bookshops. I wrote the first edition of one guidebook and updated the second edition, but I know that book has since been reprinted twice without further updates. How can travelers rely on those books? In some cases, I think the publishers have a lot to answer for, particularly when new museums or significant sights would make a ‘Top 10’ list but haven’t been added.

Any guidebook series you do like for local recommendations?
We like niche guidebooks, such as Hedonist’s Guides, which uses authors that really know their stuff when it comes to restaurants, bars, and hotels.Hedonists also come in a cool hardcover book as well, so they don’t fall apart, and as iPhone apps that are updated much more frequently than the book.

This year, on our Grantourismo trip, we’ve been on a mission to find locally produced guidebooks in each place we’ve visited, and when we’ve tested out a book and loved it we’ve interviewed the publishers/editors and showcased the book on our site, such as the arty and rather philosophical ‘My Local Guide to Venice‘ and the straight-talking ‘Not for Tourists‘
in New York. We want to encourage travelers to look for these books because they bring a uniquely local flavor and multiple perspectives on their destinations, unlike the big mainstream global guidebook publishers where the authors’ personalities are never allowed to shine.


What can user-generated content like TripAdvisor offer travelers compared to traditional media?
I think user-generated content supplements books and travel features in newspapers/magazines but can never replace quality guidebook authorship or travel journalism. While user-generated content wins out in terms of currency (the reviews have dates), guidebook authors and travel journalists are professionals with expertise. It’s our job to assess hotels, restaurants, bars, sights, and so on. Having slept in thousands of hotels across all budget categories, eaten tens of thousands of meals at all kinds of restaurants, visited thousands of museums, etc, gives you a degree of experience and expertise that the average traveler who has 2 weeks (in the USA) or at most 4-8 weeks (in the UK/Australia/Europe) holiday can never hope to match. If a guidebook author tells me the XXX hotel is the best in Milan and a reviewer on Trip Advisor tells me the YYY hotel is the best, I know whose opinion I’m going to trust.

If the traveler writing on Trip Advisor focuses on describing in detail their very specific experience of a hotel or restaurant, that kind of information can be helpful when weighed up against other reviews by travelers and experts. Where it can be detrimental is when the Trip Advisor reviewer starts making claims about a certain hotel being the best in the city or the cheapest or friendliest or whatever. What I want to know is how many hotels have they stayed at or inspected to be able to compare their hotel to? A guidebook writer specializing on a destination might have stayed at a dozen hotels in that city over a number of years, and inspected 50 others. So when it comes to user-generated content, my main issue is with the authority of authorship. There are also plenty of games being played out behind the scenes with
manipulation of reviews (both positive and negative) of properties. In a recent destination we visited a local foodie who told us to simply ignore the top 10 places listed on Trip Advisor as they’re rubbish. And she was right. We’ve personally seen scathing reviews of hotels and restaurants that we know are some of our favourites in the world – so who are you going to trust? The user ‘britney_1537’ or a professional travel writer?

Where do you see travel journalism going?
I can’t see travel journalism in magazines or newspapers changing significantly because it hasn’t changed in its genre, form or structure a great deal at all. What has changed is that there are far more journalists working for broadsheets and travel magazine these days that are doing trips ‘courtesy of’ a tourism body or travel operator – and it’s apparent from the first paragraph, even if it’s not declared. There has definitely been a trend toward publications redefining and narrowing their focus and we’ve seen wonderful new niche travel publications born in the last year or so such as Wend and AFAR – a magazine after our own hearts and minds!

I can see traditional travel publications embracing more user-generated content in the way that some of the UK newspapers have been doing by incorporating reader’s travel writing and tips and linking to those on their main travel pages. I love how The Guardian in the UK engages its readers on Twitter and I dig the Twi-Trips that Benji Lanyado does, which are kind of mini-versions of that fantastic journey the Twitchhiker did that had us all engrossed in his journey halfway round the world relying totally on the hospitality of strangers.

I also think we’ll start to see more travel writers like Terence and I who have worked across traditional media platforms entering into direct relationships with companies as we have with HomeAway Holiday-Rentals and producing content on their own websites and blogs or on the company’s blog, as say, David Whitley has done for Round the World Flights in the UK. But it will only work if the writer can negotiate editorial control as we did with HomeAway Holiday-Rentals. As long as writers maintain their integrity and apply the same ethics they would to a story for a newspaper or magazine, it’s a good thing. But how many travel companies are willing to give writers this freedom? If you look at our last few posts on Cape Town and our first posts on Kenya – which are both reflective and critical – you have to ask yourself how many travel-related companies are willing to let writers produce this kind of content that doesn’t gloss over the situation on the ground?

How can travelers benefit from the changing media landscape?
Travellers can benefit by content that is more creative and less restricted by a publications editorial style or writing guidelines, by content that is more freewheeling in spirit. A perfect example is Pam Mandel who blogs at Nerd’s Eye View, who has a unique, intimate, chatty style of writing that wouldn’t work for a lot of newspapers for instance – but she’s heading off to Antarctica soon on a sponsored trip and I can’t wait to see how she brings her own singular brand of writing to that adventure. What’s important with these gigs, like Grantourismo, is that travel writers continue to be upfront, honest, critical and opinionated in their writing. They need to maintain their integrity and ethics. Travelers in turn need to expect that of the writers they’re reading – if they’re seeing ‘sponsored story’ or company widgets/logos on their blogs (both travel writers and bloggers), they need to look for an editorial policy. It’s only by writing critically that writers will win readers’ trust in the long term and projects like Grantourismo will succeed.

Check out more on Grantourismo on their blog and Twitter page.

All photos courtesy of Terence Carter.