10 gorgeous travel writing examples
Our world is a tapestry of landscapes — from serene alpine lakes and misty cloud forests to the storied streets of cobblestoned cities.
The best travel writers can transport readers to far-flung destinations and introduce them to new cultures and experiences. For travel brands, that same storytelling can drive measurable results: longer dwell time, stronger brand affinity, and more qualified traffic to booking pages.
In this guide, we share six travel writing tips and 10 examples (and interactive formats) you can adapt for destination campaigns, hotel collections, airline routes, and tour itineraries—so your stories inspire and convert.
Whether you're a travel writer, a publisher, or destination marketer, we've got plenty of inspiration to get you started.
With helpful examples in each section, we'll cover:
And six tips:
What do Tripadvisor, Wanderlust, and Mansion Global have in common?
They publish stunning, immersive travel stories with Shorthand.
And so can you!
Sign up now.
The features of great travel writing
The best travel writing is unique, but there are still some general guidelines you’ll want to follow to make your travel writing stand out from the pack. Here are some travel writing tips to help you compete with the best examples of the genre.
- Have a point of view. Great travel writers — from the travel books of Bill Bryson and John Steinbeck to the documentaries of Paul Theroux — all have very specific points of view that are difficult to copy. Find your voice, and your travel articles will truly sing.
- Take great photos. The best travel writing is visually immersive, using high resolution images and video to engage the reader’s senses. Even if you’re not creating a digital magazine or photo essay, modern travel writing relies on great visual assets.
- Use multimedia content. If you can, create audio and video assets, too, and consider building out your story with a digital storytelling platform to use interactive features. Embed podcasts and clips to keep the reader engaged.
- Learn from the best. Keep track of longform feature stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and steal their techniques. (Good travel writers borrow, great travel writers steal, to butcher T.S. Eliot.)
- Create a beautiful web presence. We love the print Lonely Planet travel guides, but these days you need to produce stunningly engaging content on the web. Standards are high, but you’d be amazed what kinds of design layouts you can do with modern interactive content platforms.
- Provide a sense of adventure — even if you’re not strictly doing ‘adventure travel’. Whether you’re writing a first person travel memoir or writing about your backpacker’s trip through the Amazon, you want to keep your reader engaged with your travel experiences.
- Make it educational. Teach the reader something new about the world they’re exploring.
- Edit your work. The best travel writers kill their darlings and pay attention to details — hello, commas — knowing that this is how the best work is created.
Want to improve the efficiency of your writing process? Check out our list of the best writing tools.
Transport your readers with Shorthand’s destination marketing template
Tip 1 - Zoom in
Inspire readers and move them to action by exploring a location's unique history and culture. By focusing on just one place, your readers get the chance to experience it deeply through your words and imagery.
Travel marketers could use this tactic for hero destination hubs or seasonal pushes, including 'book now' modules, deal windows, and partner embeds.
Example 1. Echoes of the Ancestors in Northern Soul
This article in Northern Soul, the digital magazine of Canadian travel company Landsby, explores the Land of Ancestors, or Thaidene Nëné in the local Indigenous language.
With boating, fishing, foraging, and camp cooking on the beach, this is an in-depth look — using full-width video, media galleries, rich photography, and great writing.
Looking for more inspiration? Check out our roundup of ten stunning photo essay examples.
The right images can make a story feel polished and inspired.
The right images can make a story feel polished and inspired.
Tip 2 - Time travel to historic attractions
Taking readers back through historical moments is a great way to achieve more depth in your stories. It's perfect for heritage routes, museum passes, or rail journeys — pair historic venues with 'Plan your visit' anchors and opening-hour FAQs.
Example 2. On the Trail of King Arthur, by English Heritage
This story uses Scrollpoints to take the reader on a tour of historical sites throughout Great Britain, in a story that blends real events and places with myth and legend.
Our Scrollpoints section allows animations like this to be controlled by the reader's scrolling.
Our Scrollpoints section allows animations like this to be controlled by the reader's scrolling.
Example 3. Never standing still, by CN Tower
Leaning on history isn’t just reserved for relics from hundreds or thousands of years ago. To celebrate its 50th birthday, Toronto’s CN Tower published a scrolling timeline featuring archive photos, milestones, and new experiences and upgrades opened over the years. Surrounded by calls to action to ‘plan your visit’, book a table at the 360 Restaurant, or plan an event, it’s the perfect way to leverage a modern-day icon’s history for destination marketing.
With Shorthand, remember that you always have the option to add custom HTML to add further customisations to your stories. See a list of our recommended third party tools in this support document.
Tip 3 - Hit the highlights with a listicle
Not every trip allows for the luxury of time. In order to get the point across, sometimes a quick and to-the-point listicle is all that's necessary to deliver a clear and time-efficient message. This can be great for paid social landing pages: '3-day itinerary', '5 neighbourhoods to check out', or 'Top 7 family stays' — each item with its own CTA.
Example 4. Christie’s looks at five spectacular wineries from around the world
This quick read gets right to the point for each winery. With one full-width photo, a short passage of text, and one secondary photo for each travel destination, it is a quick whirlwind tour that gets readers interested in some international travel.
Creating a unique online travel story can seem like a daunting task, but Shorthand's many easy-to-use features exist to help make your stories exceptional. There are thousands of destinations waiting to be written about, and we can't wait to see where your stories take us next.
There are many ways to customise a Shorthand story to serve as a landing page.
There are many ways to customise a Shorthand story to serve as a landing page.
Example 5. Say G’day to Australia with Trailfinders in Wanderlust
So much more than a numbered list, this one shows the true, expanded potential of the listicle storytelling format. It contains rich, full-width shots of some iconic Australian landmarks, and breaks its items into seven recommendations—each with its own “Who’s this trip perfect for?” section—so readers can choose the adventure that suits their tastes.
Tip 4 - Keep it practical
Travel stories don't always need to inspire wanderlust, or transport readers to far-flung destinations. Some of the most effective and important travel stories simply provide practical advice — whether that's how to exchange currency, say 'thank you' in a foreign language, or avoid danger.
Use this style for trust-building and booking with confidence: safety, accessibility, arrival info.
Example 6. Travel Weekly's Traveling While Female
This story explores how female travellers can stay safe, and uses data to stress the importance of improving women's safety abroad. By displaying the data as interactive graphics, Travel Weekly draws extra emphasis to key statistics.
Make your data memorable by giving it special emphasis.
Make your data memorable by giving it special emphasis.
Tip 5 - Bring it all together
When you've written a couple of beautiful travel stories, what's next?
Tie together your creative vision by consolidating your stories into a single landing page.
Destination marketers could consider a campaign content hub with segmentation: families/foodies/adventure/luxury, for example.
You can use Shorthand to create a home for all of your stories, whether that's by using our Collection section or by including links in other section types.
Example 7. Luxury Travel's hub
Luxury travel nests all of its feature content within a Shorthand story. The page takes advantage of our media-rich sections to create a scrolling archive of their beautiful travel stories.
Consolidate your features in a single Shorthand story.
Consolidate your features in a single Shorthand story.
There are myriad ways to turn a Shorthand story into a landing page.
Example 8. Perth Now, Spring in Perth
This example takes a simple, colourful approach.
There are many ways to customise a Shorthand story to serve as a landing page.
There are many ways to customise a Shorthand story to serve as a landing page.
Tip 6 - Immerse your reader with multimedia
When words and photos simply aren't enough to convey the complexity of a travel story, add another layer of reader engagement using various forms of media.
Use ‘sound-on’ moments (local voices, guides, chefs) to differentiate brand — then finish with a clear next step.
Example 9. A Safari to the World of Puffins, by Opplev Runde
This story starts like many others: a title, a ‘book now’ button, and a beautiful full-width image of a puffin by the sea. But one more scroll, and the reader is suddenly joining the walking tour. Videos of a guide taking a walking group through the first part of a tour in a visitor centre are followed later in the piece by hiking videos through Runde, the island in Norway.
Example 10. Descobreix el Gust de Lleida amb els productes i la cuina del territori, in El Nacional
This sponsored story promoted by the Provincial Council of Lleida is a fantastic multimedia hub. With full-width video throughout, readers are enticed to scroll on and peruse the culinary experiences, recommendations, regions, venues, and vendors on show — each with dedicated CTA links, ensuring it meets its marketing goal of promoting the province.
Ready to turn these examples and ideas into high-performing campaign pages? Take a look at Shorthand's 4 free destination marketing templates.
For more inspiration, browse our gallery of example tourism and travel stories, or see how travel giant Tripadvisor is using Shorthand as a certified pitch winner in this case study.
Travel writing FAQs for writers and destination marketers
What makes a great travel marketing story?
Great travel marketing stories transport the reader to a destination through writing and media that informs and entices, before serving up a strong, relevant call to action.
The example stories in this article do it in a number of different ways—some focus on a single place or experience, others a range. They’re catered to their audience, often breaking their recommendations into segments and interests, and they immerse readers in brilliant creativity to maximise engagement and recall.
How do you structure a travel story to keep readers scrolling?
Consider the content, goal, and readers of your story. At the discovery stage, you may be writing for browsing readers who are seeking inspiration and ideas. Here is your chance to lean into a longer form, with writing and media aimed at keeping a reader engaged, while serving up subtle “learn more” calls to action throughout. For stronger “book now” content, shorter, more structured content may be preferable—perhaps a listicle or comparison page.
In any case, you must be aware of the reading patterns of time-poor online audiences and how to structure content to meet their needs. Shorthand’s guide to engagement is well worth a read, as it explains reading patterns, structure, and the types of content that work.
How can travel brands use travel writing techniques without sounding like ads?
Consider sponsored content or owned media. Some of the examples above, like Trailfinders in Wanderlust and Perth Now’s spring hub, are paid placements in the pages of travel or consumer mastheads. They’re fine examples of sponsored content that properly leverages those mastheads’ audience affinity. That’s one way to do it.
Others are owned media — like the English Heritage, Opplev Runde, and CN Tower ones — published on the brand’s channel. This gives full control over the message.
Both methods are transparent about their goals: to entice or sell. Transparency’s important, as readers don’t like to feel “tricked” when reading marketing material. And both methods still allow the brand to offer value to the reader, establish itself as a knowledgeable travel companion, and ultimately include its marketing call to action.
For further information, read our guides to sponsored content and owned media, which contain tips and examples.
How do you write an engaging travel introduction to hook readers fast?
A strong travel introduction does three jobs in the first few sentences: it drops the reader into a vivid moment, signals what the story will deliver, and sets a reason to keep scrolling.
For travel brands, keep it human first, then earn the CTA later. Lead with experience, but weave in one trust-building detail (season, neighbourhood, who it’s for) so readers know it’s relevant before you ask them to book.
Built with Shorthand