As more bloggers make their hobby their main income source (as a couple of my friends are planning to do) does this mark a change in the way that PR and marketing departments deal with bloggers?

When we wrote books for LP, they’d mostly email us reader’s comments that had been emailed, but they’d also send us a stack of photocopies of reader’s handwritten lists, so would other publishers, like DK, AA Guides, Thomas Cook, etc, and this was just a few years ago!

With blogs it should be easier for readers to connect with the author/reviewer by leaving a comment, than having to hand write a letter and then post by snail mail?

If the place was wonderful – although I don’t think there was any place that was 100% perfect (there never is, not even with hotels) – then, we most certainly gushed, like the London penthouse we stayed in, or the Austin houses, for example.

But if there were problems we wrote about them. For instance, the place we stayed at in Kenya didn’t have the promised internet access (that HomeAway Holiday-Rentals actually paid to have put on!), the fan wasn’t working properly, the toilet didn’t work properly, the mosquito net had holes in it, the kitchen was unhygenic, etc etc. Diani Beach itself was also disappointing on a number of levels. We had to tell it like it is. We were accused by one reader of “biting the hand that was feeding us” (perhaps a friend of the owners!) but everyone’s credibility is at stake here – ours, HomeAwayUK’s. If we want readers to trust us, we need to be honest.

Some bloggers don’t seem to understand the importance of this and I think maybe that’s because they don’t (yet) have a connection with the travellers reading their blogs – I wonder how many bloggers have had travellers read their reviews, go to a place, and then come back and say, thanks, I loved that place. Whereas when we wrote guidebooks, readers would always be sending in letters (yes, some handwritten even!) with feedback, and the publishers would give us those letters with our briefs, so there was always a connection to the reader’s experience.

So that’s one reason why it wasn’t a press trip from our perspective, but I guess HomeAwayUK could see it as a yearlong press trip in a way, though we only wrote about their properties once every two weeks and the rest of the time we were exploring our own stories. For them, it was definitely a marketing-communications exercise, in that we weren’t only reviewing the properties but promoting a lifestyle, a way of travelling, i.e. living like locals, slow travel, sustainable travel, etc.

A ‘press trip’ also suggests an organized trip, arranged by a PR, where the media is shuffled from one location to another, whereas the only thing arranged for us was the accommodation and flights, and once we arrived in a place we were figuring out for ourselves what we wanted to do and what we wanted to write about.

Re not writing a hotel review if a hotel isn’t worth writing about, it’s very different if you’re self-publishing, but if you’re doing, say, a ’48 Hours in…’ story and only have space for three hotels you’re not going to send people to a bad one; ditto if you’re doing a magazine story and can only include five hotels; or even a guidebook where you might need to write about 10 or 20 hotels for a city – if there are 20 better hotels then you’re simply not going to include the bad one. So it’s not about self-censorship at all, it’s about being discerning and making choices firmly with travellers in mind, because, after all, the whole point of our writing is to show travellers a good time. Not a bad one. :)