Travelocity video contest awards winners $5,000 voluntourism vacation grants

Travelocity knows you work hard. That’s why the online travel company would like to give you a $5,000 grant to go on vacation.

Calm down now. You have to work to win your just reward. And by work, I mean you or a team need to submit a winning video. Then you have to use your five thousand smackers to take a Signature Trip volunteer vacation offered by Travelocity’s voluntourism partners. Examples include doing trail work in Alaska with the American Hiking Society, developing community projects in Tanzania with Cross-Cultural Solutions, working side-by-side with scientists on an Amazonian riverboat with Earthwatch Institute, or living in a children’s home in Peru with Globe Aware. Oh, and there’s one more catch. The top 25 finalists will be determined based on the number of online votes they receive from social networking sites.

Since 2006, Travelocity’s Travel for Good® program has been annually awarding eight, $5,000 volunteer vacation grants to American applicants. Travel for Good’s main objectives are green hotels and voluntourism. As Gadling has previously reported, voluntourism is one of the fastest growing sectors of the travel industry.

If hands-on, experiential travel is up your alley, go to VolunteerJournals.com. The site will walk you through the easy process to upload your video. You can then promote your video on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and send it to friends and family for voting.
Each video should explain why you deserve to win, and which Signature Trip from Travelocity’s voluntourism partners inspires you. Volunteers and grant winners also have use of the site’s free blogging platform to share their experiences.

The top 25 finalists will be determined by 50 percent audience support and 50 percent quality of their videos. There are two contest cycles per year, and Travelocity employees will select four winners from the top 25 finalists from each cycle. There are two deadlines for entries: March 31 (voting is April 1-May 31), and July 1-September 31 (voting October 1-November 30). Get filming!

Gadling t-shirts go on adventure travel around the world


One of the best things about blogging for Gadling is seeing where my coworkers are off to next. Like me, they’re sure to pack that essential item for every adventure traveler’s kit: the Gadling t-shirt.

We’ve collected photos of Gadlingers flying their colors in some of the most remote parts of the world, and some places that are not so remote but equally rugged, such as the waiting area at JFK airport. Above we see Mike Barish in Rotorua, New Zealand , with his new girlfriend an ostrich who looks very jealous of Mike’s stylish choice in adventure apparel. Check out the gallery for a photo of him getting up close and personal with a lizard on the Tiwi Islands, Australia.

Mike says, “Something about my Gadling shirt seems to attract wildlife (sadly, that has also included mosquitoes). These two critters behaved themselves while I posed with them, but neither seemed particularly thrilled to share the spotlight with me.

Also in the gallery you’ll see Annie Scott on the Zambezi River, Zambia, and at JFK; Jeremy Kressmann at Kuang Si waterfall near Luang Prabang, Laos; Sean McLachlan in Somaliland and the Jesse James Farm, Missouri; and Tom Johansmeyer heading to the airport.

We’re all busy planning our trips for 2011, so if you have any place you’d like us to write up, drop us a line. Our dance cards aren’t full yet and we’re a pretty flexible bunch. At least that’s what the ostrich says about Mike.

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Travel photographs: which reality would you rather see?

I got a good chuckle out of a story on Business Insider yesterday, “Here’s Why You Should Never Trust the Photos Hotels Post Online.” The accompanying slide show offers shots of a dozen hotels side by side, so you can see what’s marketing hype and what is severe reality. In a way, it’s shocking, but cynics out there are likely to concede that they aren’t surprised by the stark contrast in the photos.

So, this creates a real problem for travel bloggers. We go out with the goal of producing solid content, and that includes making it visually appealing. On the other hand, not all of us (me, specifically) are terribly handy with a camera. The result is a tough choice: do I go with the beautiful and give a property the chance to put its best foot forward, or do I expose them to the horrible risk associated with my caffeine- and nicotine-induced shakes? I guess a third option is to mix in both and identify clearly who’s responsible for what, but that could look awkward, too.

I’m genuinely curious: what do you think? Do you value the aesthetically pleasing, knowing that it’s designed to be exactly that? Or, do you prefer the harsh truth, even if that truth is colored by a gap in photographic skills? Leave a comment below to let us know. Thanks!

[photo by e53 via Flickr]

Don George: Five things I learned at TBEX

I approached last month’s TBEX10 in New York – the travel bloggers’ conference organized by Travel Blog Exchange — with a mix of excitement and trepidation. The excitement was because I felt like an explorer on the precipice of a new world, about to stare out onto – and immerse myself in — a landscape I’d only seen in glimpses and snatches. The trepidation was because it’s unsettling sailing from an old comfortable world into a new unfamiliar one, and even though I’ve been wandering in the digital publishing world for 15 years now – half of my professional life — my apprenticeship was in the old world of print publishing and the new world still feels, well, new to me.

So I landed in New York on June 24 – and experienced over the next three days an intoxicatingly varied and vibrant microcosm of the evolving world of travel blogging. I meant to write about the conference immediately after it ended, but a couple of days later I was on a plane to Peru for a seven-day exploration of the Sacred Valley, so I had to put my TBEX reflections momentarily on hold.

Now I’m back and those reflections have had a few weeks to simmer and settle into these five things I learned at TBEX10:

1. It’s a Small World After All: My aforementioned trepidations melted as soon as I walked into the pre-conference kick-off party. Not only did the crowd contain lots of familiar faces – Wendy Perrin, Jim Benning, Spud Hilton, Mike Yessis – but equally comforting, a great number of familiar names were in the room: people I already felt I knew from Twitter or Facebook. This humanization of Twitter handles – “So you’re nerdseyeview!” … “don_george, meet nomadicmatt” … “Heather_Poole in person!” — became an ongoing amazement and joy of the conference.

So, for about five minutes I felt like an outsider – the awkward guy in the corner sipping a beer and surreptitiously checking out the crowd — and after that I jumped onto the roller-coaster and just enjoyed the ride. Whatever its graces and pitfalls, one truth of social media became crystal clear for me: In its own way, social media is fashioning a new world order, enabling interpersonal connections that span political borders, geographical distances and time zones in a way the world has never experienced before. Time after time after time I witnessed people who had never met hugging like old friends: “I feel like I already know you!” and “It’s so great to finally meet you!” were two prime mantras of the conference.

I believe that great travel narratives transport people and illuminate places as no other literary creation can.

2. The Narrative Is Not Dead: One of the portentous questions I brought with me to the conference concerned the death of the travel narrative. I love travel narratives; I’ve basically made my career by writing and editing travel narratives. For three decades I have believed that great travel narratives transport people and illuminate places as no other literary creation can. But for a few years now I’d been hearing that the rise of online publishing and social media portended the demise and eventual extinction of the old-fashioned narrative.

So I was truly thrilled to discover at TBEX that a great number of attendees do care about great “old-fashioned” travel storytelling. This point was reinforced for me many times over – by kind people who told me how much they had enjoyed my writing or had learned from my Travel Writing book, by the tremendously gratifying response to the “upping your game” panel led expertly by Mike Yessis, and by the delightful and moving presentation Pam Mandel and Mike Barish did on the final day of the conference, reading eight terrific, transporting blog posts.

I came away from TBEX understanding that while digital publishing affects and will affect the shape of travel writing now and to come, the appeal of great travel storytelling remains as vibrant and alluring in this new world as in the old. And I came away believing fervently that while the forms these stories take will morph as the media morph, the fundamental compulsion-quest to create travel stories that evoke and enlighten abides as strongly as ever.

3. Persistence + Passion = Possibility: One of the points I make in Travel Writing, which was originally not written with bloggers in mind, is that being successful as a travel writer requires substantial doses of both passion and persistence. This same message came through loud and clear at TBEX.

Out of almost 400 total attendees, invited panelists and paying participants alike, you could probably cram the number of people actually making a living through their travel writing/blogging into a Gotham Limo. But – and this point was made in panel after panel and party after party — this shouldn’t stop anyone from pursuing their dreams: Travel bloggers/writers just need to realize that persistence is absolutely essential to success, and that the tree of persistence has many boughs: persistence in pursuing your travels; persistence in creating your posts, portfolios and videos; and persistence in promoting yourself, from tweeting to attending travel industry functions to participating in conferences like TBEX.

It’s as true today as it was when I started in this business: Persistence and passion are the keys to possibility.

It’s as true today as it was when I started in this business: Persistence and passion are the keys to possibility. As I write in my book, “The world of travel writing is open to everyone – if you love to travel and love to write, it’s a natural. No one can guarantee that you’ll be successful, but I can guarantee that you’ll never be successful if you don’t try.” Try, TBEX echoed in many different ways, from Gary Arndt‘s empowering presentation on “travel porn” to the multi-faceted panel on niche-mining. The threading subtext was this: However you GPS Success (acclaim, influence, profitability, freebie-arity), you won’t get there without passionate persistence and persistent passion. (And, the corollary message ran, remember that passion + persistence = possibility, not necessarily profitability – but that without the two p’s, profitability is an impossibility.)

4. It’s Not About Old School and New School: While many serious, important issues and questions were raised and explored at the conference, from ethical responsibilities to SEO exigencies (at which point I wrote in my journal: Can literary grace win the Google race?), this Old School-New School lightbulb was the biggest illumination of TBEX for me. I flew into New York thinking there was a Grand Canyon-like divide separating the Principality of Print to the west and the Domain of Digitalism to the east. This notion had been reinforced by countless conversations with cherished colleagues of many decades who have made their careers as newspaper and magazine editors and writers, most of whom have seen the publishing landscape convulse before their eyes and many of whom feel stranded on the wrong side of the divide.

But I came away from TBEX feeling passionately that it’s not about Old School and New School media or creation – and that positing the current publishing situation in this way is distinctly unhelpful. Whether Old School or New School, most of us travel journalists/writers/bloggers are trying to do the same thing – communicate our passion and expertise to readers/viewers who are curious about the world. For some creators, this communication takes the form of practical, nuts-and-bolts-style information, whether service pieces, sidebars, charticles, or blogs; for others, it takes the form of evocative personal narratives and reflections, sometimes woven in words and sometimes in aural and/or visual threads. While our backgrounds may differ, our goals are fundamentally the same.

So I’m no longer thinking of Planet Publishing as divided into the Principality of Print and the Domain of Digitalism: I think this is an artificial and detrimental divide, and my redrawn map now shows one jostling, thriving landmass of multi-media mountains and lakes and rainforests provisionally called the Continent of Creative Communication. (Clearly, I need a little help with my place-naming – all suggestions welcome.)

5. The Only Constant is Change: I realized at TBEX that I had brought a static view of the universe with me to the conference. I’ve already alluded to this above, seeing things in terms of outsider and insider, print and digital, Old School and New School. But my last great TBEX epiphany was that everything is in flux, the blogosphere just as much as the printosphere: The media for the travel message are constantly evolving, as is the globe those media are trying to capture and convey.

It’s all about change. And the best we can do is embrace and celebrate that change.

Travel is alive and well, and we who love it continue to play a vital role as evangelists with a sacred mission, to pave the pathway to peace and understanding around the world.

Embrace and celebrate. For me, the takeaway symbol of the conference was a huge hug: of the future, of the blogging community, of the globe we honor and cherish and try to evoke and share, and of the eternal exhilaration and expansion of travel — the life-changing lessons we absorb and connections we build. This was the ultimate inspiration-message of TBEX10 for me: Travel is alive and well, and we who love it and labor in it continue to play a vital role as evangelists with a sacred mission, to pave the pathway to peace and understanding around the world.

What do you think? Leave a comment here or send me an email at Don DAWT George AT Gadling DAWT Com.

[Photos: Flickr | GalavantingGals; Nerd’s Eye View; Bucky925; GalavantingGals]

TSA investigator has butterfingers

Loose lips sink ships, right?

A TSA that has been reactive since the beginning of December – thanks to leaks of both its operating manual and a sensitive security memo – is now sporting another black eye. It seems that one of the investigators who delivered a subpoena to the home of travel blogger Steven Frischling couldn’t keep track of his notebook. According to a post by blogger Mary Kirby on Flightglobal.com, this federal employee accidentally left his notebook in a public place.

Is it any wonder the TSA is plagued with leaks?

The TSA didn’t respond to Kirby’s request for comment, and she cites an anonymous source as providing her the info, so there’s obviously more waiting to be told.