6 examples of gorgeous travel writing
Inspiration to help your next travel blog, guidebook, or article stand out from the crowd.
We live on a wondrous, ever-changing planet— from alpine lakes and cloud forests to ancient cobblestoned cities.
The best travel writers can transport readers to these far-flung destinations, and to introduce them to new cultures and experiences. Good travel writing can be an insightful, thought-provoking, and even life-changing genre.
And with interactive content platforms, it’s possible for travel writers to create truly immersive reading experiences online. In this guide, we introduce six ideas — and examples of travel writing — to help you create beautiful, interactive travel stories.
Whether you're a beginner travel writer, a publisher, destination marketer, or freelance travel blogger, we've got plenty of inspiration to get you started.
What do the BBC, Tripadvisor, and Penguin have in common?
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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 photo essay, modern travel writing relies of great visual assets.
- Use multimedia content where you can. 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 TS 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 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.
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.
Intrepid Travel's Shorthand story 'Welcome to Olkola Country' is simple, yet effective. The highlight of the story is its elegant writing — a blend of reporting and personal narrative that explores the history, culture, and ecology of an ancestral land of the Olkola people in Australia. The story is elevated with thoughtful photos and videos, and ends with a call to action for the newly-inspired reader.
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.
2. Time travel
Taking readers back through historical moments is a great way to achieve more depth in your stories.
In the story The Museum of Atari, Mario and Electronic Childhood Dreams, Channel News Asia uses Shorthand to create a stunning visual story about a little-known museum of retro video games in Singapore. The highlight of the story is an interactive scrollytelling timeline about the history of video games, which is created using the Shorthand Reveal feature and animates a pixel character as the reader scrolls.
Our Reveal section allows animations like this to be controlled by the reader's scrolling.
Our Reveal section allows animations like this to be controlled by the reader's scrolling.
3. Immerse your reader
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.
The Sydney Opera House story A Guide to Dance Rites uses multimedia to bring indigenous culture to life. With elements like animation, slideshows, and embedded audio clips, readers can feel fully immersed in one of Australia's most traditional dance competitions.
Embed your own code to add further customisation to your story.
Embed your own code to add further customisation to your story.
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.
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.
Travel Weekly's story Traveling While Female 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.
5. Zoom out
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. 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.
For example, 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. Here's another example from Perth Now, which 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.
4. Just the highlights
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.
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.
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