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- Travel around the world and write about your experiences for a living
- You'll need excellent writing skills, a passion for travel, and the ability to sell your work
- This is a highly competitive industry so you'll need dedication and persistence to succeed
As a travel writer your role would be to travel to destinations around the world, experience the culture, tourist attractions, and landscape, and write about them to help others who might consider visiting understand more about the location.
DAY-TO-DAY DUTIES
Travel writing can take different forms - guidebooks, practical advice articles, first-person features, or even novels, but you'll need to write work that there's a market for, and you'll need to be able to sell your work effectively to editors and publishers.
DAY-TO-DAY ENVIRONMENT
Some travel writers work for themselves as independents, pitching their work to publications who then pay to print them (or being commissioned by them to produce a piece of work), while others are employed full time by travel publishers. It is more common these days for travel writers to work as freelancers, however.
This is a highly competitive industry, so many travel writers combine this work with other jobs.
You'll need
There are no set requirements for becoming a travel writer, but you'll need to have a passion for travel (an experience of travelling on your own), excellent writing skills, a creative mind to come up with new angles or interesting stories, and a high level of persistence.
Studying English or journalism at university may help you build the skills you need.
To get started you'll need to build up your writing skills - keeping a travel journal or publishing a travel blog is a good way to get going. Some travel writers are able to build up audiences on social media platforms like instagram and move into a travel writing career from there. It can help if you can build up specialist knowledge of one or more destinations or regions - editors want to know that you know your stuff if you're going to write for them.
CAREER PROSPECTS
There are a number of specialist travel publishers, guides, and magazines like lonely planet that focus just on travel, but there are also many other titles both online and offline that have travel sections or that you could pitch your articles to.