Write Around the World (How To Write A Good Travel Review)

Member Name: MykReeve

Product:	How To Write A Good Travel Review
Date:	08/04/02 (283 review reads)
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Advantages: Nice comments

Disadvantages: Difficult to balance information and experience

Hi there. Thanks for asking for my advice, surprisingly few people do, you know. Over the course of this opinion, I hope to give you the benefit of my advice about how to write a good travel opinion. Now, before I start offering it, I feel I ought to clear up a potential source of misunderstanding, and attempt to pre-empt some of the criticism this opinion might receive.

In this opinion, I will be giving advice about how to write a Travel opinion in a style that I personally find very useful. There are plenty of other ways to write Travel opinions, and by writing this opinion, I am not attempting to reduce the validity of these other styles - I am merely expressing my preferences, and attempting to convey which information I feel is most important to include in a Travel opinion. I trust that this distinction is clear.

ABOUT ME

The travel bug. Itchy feet. I have these things. The only barrier to my travel is my financial situation. It all started back in 1998, when I was sent to a tiny village, halfway up a mountain in East Switzerland for a population genetics conference. Sitting on a train station in the picturesque little village of Ziegelbrücke, waiting for a connecting train, I suddenly got an odd feeling - a pang of independence, if you will.

I was far (well, relatively far) from home, on my own, and it was up to me to get where I was going. With hindsight, it seems pretty inconsequential - it's not as if Switzerland's the other side of the world or anything - but at the time, it was quite a powerful experience. But basically, since then, travel's seemed easy - just a case of making it happen. Since then, I've travelled as much as my meagre finances have allowed.

My main reason for writing on dooyoo is to try to encourage other people to travel more. Yes, I'm well aware of the constraints that finances can put on travel... all too well aware, as it happens... but all the same, I tend to reserve my
greatest enthusiasm for encouraging others to experience other cultures and ways of life. In terms of what I enjoy seeing, I love observing mankind's achievements first hand, so for me, seeing buildings and construction projects are generally higher priority than seeing nature's beauty. That's not to say I don't enjoy seeing natural beauty but, by way of analogy, I enjoyed visiting the Terracotta Warriors and walking through the bustling streets of Hong Kong more than cruising down the Li River. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the latter, more that personally I prefer to see and celebrate human accomplishments.

So, during my tenure on dooyoo, I've written some seventy-one Travel opinions (about a quarter of them), of which nineteen have received crowns. Since November 2000, I have been the Travel category guide at dooyoo, and am the longest serving category guide.

CLARIFICATION OF MY ROLE

As Travel category guide, my role is to read the majority of opinions submitted to the category, and advise dooyoo if I feel opinions are misplaced, inappropriate or worthy of consideration for a crown.

Now, at this point, particularly given the ill will over the distribution of crowns that seems so prevalent on the site at the moment, I feel I ought to explain this latter responsibility. Essentially, every two or three days, I email staff at dooyoo with a list of opinions that fall into any of these three categories. In the case of the latter (the "worthy of consideration for a crown" category), I will usually list more opinions than I feel are worthy of receiving a crown, and attach a brief explanation of their merits for the dooyoo staff's perusal. These opinions will all then be read by someone at dooyoo, who will decide which of them, if any, to award crowns to.

It is not necessary for me to read an opinion for it to receive a crown, or even be considered for one - all members of the site
can nominate opinions for crowns, and the staff will also consider opinions nominated in this way. Similarly, if I don't believe that an opinion should receive a crown, it does not preclude it from ever getting one - the decision is taken by dooyoo staff.

ADVICE

There are two segments to the advice included in this opinion. First, there is basic advice, which applies equally to all the areas within the Travel category, and then there is specific advice for the different types of Travel opinion (e.g. city, individual tourist attractions, airlines, etc.).

BASIC ADVICE

My first, and most important piece of advice for writing a Travel opinion is that you should actually have visited the place (or used the service) that you're writing about. For self-evident reasons, it's impossible for anyone to actually offer worthwhile advice to other consumers about something that they have no experience of. Probably most people reading this will think this is a spectacularly fatuous and redundant piece of advice, but you'd be surprised how many people try to write an opinion offering advice on somewhere they've not actually been, or are currently planning to visit.

One of the worst examples of this is in the case of online travel services, where people have been known to write an opinion about a website that they have visited, but have not attempted to actually book a service from the company. The worn analogy of judging a book by its cover springs to mind in this case. In fairness, if the person has attempted to book a service from an online company, and found their progress repeatedly stymied in some way that prevented them from booking, then their advice and experience would be valuable, despite not having actually fully used the service.

My second piece of advice is a fundamental complaint that I have about opinions in general on dooyoo. I find it very difficult to read opinions that do not have good stand
ards of spelling and grammar. The easiest way to improve your spelling and grammar is by typing your opinions into a word-processor, rather than directly into dooyoo, running them through a spell checker, and then reading the opinion back to yourself aloud. Usually, by doing this, you can spot obvious grammatical errors, or repetitive sections of your opinion that could be improved by editing. If, for example, you write something like "The sea front at this lovely little Greek village is incredibly lovely. There is a series of lovely little shops here, and the sea is lovely and blue," you might not notice your lack of diversity in adjective choice... but the chances are that a reader will, and you certainly will if you read it back to yourself. Similarly, when reading back, I tend to notice where I've used the wrong form of "your/you're", "its/it's", "there/their/they're" and so on.

Finally, my third piece of general advice concerning writing Travel opinions is to do with style. There are three main styles of oft-submitted opinion which I don't feel adequately meet the dooyoo brief; the "travelogue", the "travel brochure", and the "guidebook". This is not to say that these styles are not without their merits, but I believe that the most important thing for a dooyoo opinion is to convey information and opinion in a clear and interesting way, and I'll explain why (in general) these three styles of writing don't always meet this brief.

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a. the travelogue

Unless you're Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, or William Dalrymple (in which case, what are you doing wasting your talents on dooyoo?) travelogues can be spectacularly dull, particularly for someone who just wants to read information about, and your impressions of, a place or product.

For example, let's imagine an opinion on New York City. You're thinking about going
on holiday there for a long weekend in a couple of months, but aren't sure if it'll suit you, or what to do when you're there. You visit dooyoo and look through some opinions on the city, and stumble across a 4,000 word monstrosity that starts with "One April afternoon I settled down at home with the guidebooks I'd picked up from Lunn Poly earlier that day, and tried to decide where to go. I had picked up many city break guidebooks, thinking that I would spoil myself with a shopping expedition...". Once the writer actually gets to New York, some 1,000 words later, you're greeted with "My first day in the Big Apple! I got up early at about 7:30am, because I was determined to fit everything in, and quickly woke up my boyfriend. He was very tired because he doesn't cope very well with jetlag...". I don't know about you, but by this stage, I'm virtually comatose, and I haven't learnt anything about the city yet. I've learned about how the writer makes their travel plans, and their boyfriend's sleeping habits, but nothing that I actually went to the opinion for.

Now, once the opinion actually gets to recounting visits to museums or art galleries, it might become very informative, offering a brief description of what to see there, and the like. But, by that stage, I've given up - particularly if after 50 words about the Guggenheim - we go back to 200 words about an argument over a pair of shoes the writer's bought from Gucci, or something.

Alright, I've made that point in a spectacularly overlaboured and exaggerated way, but you see the distinction. A travelogue is rarely the clearest or most concise way to convey the sort of information that a consumer (which could be you one day) would most likely be looking for. However, having said that, travelogues can often give a very good personal account of what it is like to visit a place, and this is the best feature of this style of w
riting, to my mind.

b. the travel brochure

This is a relatively rare style of opinion. Essentially, a travel brochure opinion tells me nothing that I couldn't get from reading material from the city or country's tourist information centre, generally attaching a level of overenthusiasm to everything.

A hypothetical New York City opinion in this style might read; "Why not visit New York City this Autumn? There's so much to see, from the Empire State Building, with its incredible views over the busy island of Manhattan, to the glitzy shops of Fifth Avenue. Autumn's the ideal time to visit the city, as it gears up for the Christmas celebrations, giving New York a real buzz that makes it the most exciting city in the world!"

I've learnt nothing about the writer here, nor do I have any impression that they've actually visited New York City. How do I know I can trust their opinion, when they read like a travel brochure? There are no personal impressions offered (though the writer could claim that the adjectives they've used were their own choice, and reflect their impressions).

The other problem with the travel brochure style opinion is that it rarely offers useful information for the would-be visitor - such as how to get to the place being written about, how to get around it, how much it costs to get there, and so on.

However, a "travel brochure" style opinion is not without its merits. Generally, such an opinion contains the most important facts that would influence a decision to go to the place. In the case of the hypothetical opinion given above, the opinion does, at least, suggest reasons why someone might want to visit New York, and give a vague impression of what the city is like.

c. the guidebook

The third type of opinion, and the style which I am most prone to falling into, is the "guidebook" style. This style of opinion focuses on list
ing what there is to see in a museum or city, without attaching much personality into it, or adequately expressing any kind of opinion.

For example, (and I quote from one of my own opinions here, a (rightfully-uncrowned one) on the National Air and Space Museum in Washington), "The 'Air Transportation' gallery, which is where you'll find the main entrance to the museum while the renovation work is carried out, allows you to see the evolution of air transport for carrying people, mail and cargo. Essentially, the planes on display are all from the so called Golden Age of flight, from the 1926 Ford Tri-Motor and Douglas M-2, through to the 1937 Grumman G-21 Amphibian, via the 1933 Boeing 247D, the first modern airliner, and the 1935 Douglas DC-3."

Now, if you were specifically interested in where you could see a Grumman G-21 Amphibian aeroplane on display in a museum somewhere in the world, this would be extremely useful information. However, I concede that the majority of readers who would encounter my opinion would have little interest in which specific aeroplanes are on display in each gallery, and a much briefer paragraph describing my impressions of the style of presentation and how informative the exhibition was, would have served much better.

The same sort of problem often occurs in opinions on theme parks, which can often fall into the trap of simply listing the rides, with a sentence of description for each. It would be far better if the writer had focused on two or three typical examples, and written more about them, and added a sentence acknowledging that "There were dozens of other rides available too, ranging from childrens' carousels to huge rollercoasters."

The advantage of a guidebook style is obvious - the writer informs the reader about what there is to see and do in a place - however, when it does so at the expense of conveying information concisely, this is a problem.

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So, having discussed the positive and negative aspects of these styles, how do I think people should write? Well, the most important thing, to my mind, is that information, advice and impressions of a place or service should be expressed in a clear and interesting manner.

Personal experience and individual impressions are vitally important, however, it is important that their description or narration doesn't obfuscate the most important consumer information. If an amusing incident happened to you when on holiday somewhere which you think would amuse readers, it might be good to parenthesise it out, so that a reader who just wants to read information and your impressions can easily skip the anecdote... while leaving it available for those readers who enjoy reading personal accounts.

In terms of how to write, personally, I find it useful to have my photographs and guidebooks of places I have visited available when I'm writing about them, to refresh my memory about what I did and where.

I always end my opinions with two or three concluding paragraphs now, which summarise the most important information from the rest of the opinion in an easy-to-read way for someone looking for a very brief indication of my impressions of the city.

SPECIFIC ADVICE

a. City and Country opinions

If you're writing an opinion about a city or a country that you have visited, it would be good to start off with an explanation of why you chose to visit that country (if indeed you did), and how long you spent there. This sort of information is very useful to a reader, as it allows them to judge how well your situation compares with their own, and how much they can trust your opinion.

For example, someone considering a family holiday to Amsterdam might find an opinion by someone who has chosen to go there for drugs and sex and only spent 24 hours there, less relevant than another parent's opinion on the city.


Another important issue to include is how you got to the city or country, and why you chose to go there that way. If someone is considering travelling somewhere, they might not be clear about the best way to get there, or might not have considered all the options.

Also, it might be worth mentioning early on in the opinion how much of the city or country you saw. If you visited a city for a few days on business, it seems unlikely that you would have seen as much of the city as someone who visited for a week for leisure, and this sort of information might help a reader decide how relevant an opinion is to them. In the case of a country opinion, if you only visited one region, you might have a very biased opinion of it. For example, an Iceland in general opinion written by someone who never left the Reykjanes peninsula might not give a very broad impression of the country.

It is also important to mention how you got around the city or country when you were there. Did you use private or public transport? What were the transportation networks like? Someone who visited Paris and only ever used taxis is going to have a very different impression of what it's like to get around the city than someone who used the Metro.

Where did you stay? Were the hotels comparable with other places that you've stayed for similar prices? Were other options available? Accommodation is an important part of any holiday, and a rough indicator of the standards that a visitor can expect seems an important part of the opinion. While exact figures of prices aren't really necessary, an indication of the relative price would be useful - e.g. "Guest houses in central Istanbul are cheaper than comparable places in most European cities."

What are the options like for food in the country? Are you limited to local cuisine, or are more cosmopolitan options available? How do prices compare with restaurants back home? Are there other options,
other than restaurants?

A brief mention of the shopping options in the city wouldn't go amiss, possibly suggesting some favourite shops, or less obvious souvenir suggestions, and a vague indication of price.

What tourist attractions are available? Are they worth visiting, in your opinion? If you didn't visit all of the tourist attractions, it can still be worth mentioning ones that you didn't visit, if you wish you had!

It's also worth mentioning any other aspects of the city or country that you think would be interesting to someone considering visiting. For example, in my opinion on Istanbul, I mention the country's rampant inflation - mainly because the economic situation is so dire there that it's worth not getting any Turkish currency until you're actually out there, to ensure that it doesn't devalue too much!

Of course, throughout the opinion, as I mention above, it can be interesting to drop in references to personal anecdotes relating to your experiences... but think about how interesting and relevant they would be to a reader who doesn't know you!

b. Specific tourist attractions

Writing about a specific tourist attraction, many of the same points as in the "City or Country opinions" apply. Why did you choose to visit this tourist attraction? How long did you spend there? Was that about the right length of time, or would you have liked longer?

For someone planning how to spend their time on holiday in a city or country, it would be useful to know how long to allow for visiting the various tourist attractions.

What were the main things to see at the tourist attraction? What was your impression of the place? Would you go again?

Specifics like the entrance fee and hours of opening aren't essential. These details are prone to change, and up-to-date information can be found in guidebooks. If an attraction regularly closes early, it mi
ght be worth mentioning this, but the details of the exact hours are not essential. Similarly, giving the exact entrance fee isn't necessary, but an indication of roughly how much it was, and whether this seemed like too much or about right, is more important.

c. Airline opinions

Airlines seem to attract a lot of opinions, but seem to get very few good opinions. The most important factors to cover are the price, the check-in service, and the flight.

Firstly, you should mention the extent of your experience with the airline. If you've only flown once with a company, then obviously your opinion could give an unfairly biased impression of the airline, and a reader should be aware of this from the start. Similarly, you should give an indication of the amount of travelling that you do - if you've not flown many times before, the reader would like to be aware of this.

Next, it's worth mentioning why you flew with the airline that you did. There's no shame in admitting that the decision was an economic one. If that airline is consistently cheap for the trip that you undertook, than this is useful information for a reader.

The airline operates the check-in desk in the airline, so it's worth mentioning the quality of service provided at check-in. How early could you check-in before the flight? Were the queues long? Did they have several desks open? Were the staff friendly and helpful? Are seats allocated at check-in, or at the gate, or do you have to wait till you get to the plane?

Next, the in-flight service. I'm sick of reading opinions by people who've only ever flown once complaining that the seat in front is too close. That's how aeroplanes are. If you're going to comment on the amount of legroom available, please try to convey how the amount of legroom compares with other flights you've made.

What type of plane did you fly on? Is this the only type of plane that t
he airline uses? Did the plane look old? How clean was the interior?

What was the in-flight entertainment like? Were there any television screens? If so, where were they located? Was there a choice of programming? Were any complimentary food or drinks included in the price of your ticket? What were they like? If you specified a special meal, did you get it? Could you buy duty free gifts en route? Was there a wide choice available?

How long was the journey scheduled to take? Did the plane leave on time? Did it arrive on time? Did you have to confirm your flights beforehand? If so, did you have any trouble contacting the airline by phone?

d. Airports

In writing an opinion on an airport, there are a large number of subjects to consider, much as with the airline opinions.

How easy is the airport to get to? How far is it from the city centre? Is it served by rail, coaches, etc.? If you drive to the airport, is ample parking provided, and how expensive is it? How expensive is public transport to the airport? Is there a large taxi rank outside?

What sort of destinations do planes from the airport serve (short haul, long haul, package destinations)?

Within the airport itself, how well organised is it? How is the signposting? How clean is the airport? If the airport has several termini, can you get between them easily? Is it easy to work out which terminus to go to for your flight? Could you find the check-in desk for your airline easily?

What are the shops like in the main concourse? What are the shops like after the security check? How do you get from the main concourse to the gates (is there a monorail system, as at Stansted and Chep Lap Kok, for example)?

How do you get from the gates to the planes - via buses, by walking across the tarmac, or do the planes directly link to the gates via umbilici?

e. Services

To write a good opinion about a travel service (information websi
tes, online accommodation or flight booking sites, and so on), it really is necessary to have actually used the service. It scarcely seems relevant to comment on how useful a site seems, unless you've actually had cause to use it.

It's difficult to give specific questions to be answered in this type of Travel opinion, due to the sheer diversity of subjects that could be written about. The important thing to do really is to think about what questions you'd like answered, if you were considering using the service, (or would have liked answers to before using it yourself), and then write about your experiences answering these questions.

SUMMARY

The most important factors to writing a good Travel opinion:

- Provide information in a clear and direct way
- Think about the information you would have liked to know about a place or service, and make sure you answer those questions for other consumers
- Include your personal impressions of the place or service
- If you want to provide anecdotes, think how useful they'd be to someone who didn't know you. If they're not important, then consider parenthesising them, or leaving them out.

As I explained earlier, this is just my opinion of what constitutes a good Travel opinion, and what I look for when reading them every couple of days.

I'm not trying to suggest that this is the best, or the only, way to write Travel opinions, just that I find opinions written in this way to be the most useful style of presentation for consumers - who are, after all, the group that dooyoo opinions should be aimed at.

Summary: