Travel Content Creator Mistakes ( + Easy Fixes )
Hi, fellow travel creators. Today, we are going to be talking about the resources I use to create travel content. I don't believe in gatekeeping, so we are diving deep into the website specifically I use as the girl on the other side of travel influencer marketing.
And spoiler! One of them is the CIA. I'm really spilling the secrets here. Nobody calls them and tells them I'm doing this, but their resources are actually quite helpful, and I will dish on them later. I write over 13,000 words about travel content a month, which is about 3,200 words a day.
So yeah, you could say it's a lot. I do this a lot, but here are some of the websites I use to make travel research and content creation so much easier, and they're so reliable, I always go back to them. And to preface this, I am not sponsored by a single one of these websites, specifically the CIA.
I just think they're incredible and free tools to find the standard information about these destinations you're heading to or creating content about. One website I always use to get a really clear idea of how much it's going to cost to travel to that destination is The Broke Backpacker.
On their website, they have a really nice budget breakdown of what you'll pay if you're a backpacker, someone who's looking for something in between, or a luxury traveler. Of course, prices change depending on destination, depending on time of year, depending on location in that certain destination, but it's a good place to start.
I'm also a sucker for Trip Savvy. I use them for things like how to not look like a tourist when you're visiting a specific destination. They also have a really gray breakdown of the weather. They even break it down so specifically they'll detail how much rainfall you can expect at a certain destination, which I found especially helpful if you're visiting a place with a monsoon season or you're trying to recommend what time of year to travel to that specific place.
In addition, no travel research is complete without a trip to worldatlas.com. They have a breakdown of exactly where each country is, what it's bordered by, which shockingly, I have learned so much about geography just writing travel content, which might sound like the most obvious statement ever, but it is fascinating.
I could look at a map all day long. On World Atlas, I also learn about the terrain, the overall geography, and landscape of the region. So if I want to reference or recommend specific activities, I can use World Atlas. They also cover the languages and religions of that country.
It's great and I love it. I always use it and it's always simple to use. Now, don't laugh at this next one. That website is National Geographic Kids. It is so good and so clear. It's made for kids and it cuts right to the point. I also love cutting to the chase. And since I write so much travel content for creators and influencers, I read through so many travel blogs written by creators.
And to be completely honest with you, it feels like when you visit a website of a recipe and it is just paragraphs and paragraphs of text about the creator's own experiences, like cooking with their mom on their childhood farm, and the sunshine always came through their kitchen, that you literally forget what you're even trying to cook.
I saw the same exact thing happening in travel creator's own blogs. I was trying to find one little thing when I'm researching and I'm pouring through all these blogs about a destination and I couldn't even bear to do it anymore.
I’m just looking for one single piece of information and now we're talking about hiking shoes. I would get so overwhelmed. And I still do with all of these personal antidotes and the snacks they regretted bringing along the way. There is something to be said about personal antidotes, but there’s also a fine line creators walk of how much do I share about me because people follow me and read my blog and whatever because they care about me, versus how much information do I just provide?
No Fluff Travel
So I created something called No Fluff Travel, which is something I have never shared on my podcast so far. Now in No Fluff, I create travel guides for places near far in between that cut out the fluff. So that means the guides only contain just the real bits of information you need to know about visiting the place you're eyeing.
Right now, we're in our little National Parks era, so I have a lot of guides on National Parks as well as many more coming. You can find us on Instagram at No Fluff Travelers. The guides, because travel is so expensive, cost as much as a cup of coffee because I want them to be accessible.
Safe Travel For Women
Solo female travelers. This next website I have is for you. I just found out about Travel Ladies. It’s an app, but you can also use their website, which I highly recommend. I've actually never used the app. It gives a safety index of a specific country you're going to. A huge part of travel research is understanding whether the destination is safe and feasible to go to and who is it safe for?
This tool, Travel Ladies, has been a game changer because they have reviews left by solo female travelers, for solo female travelers. And in the reviews they share their time about being a solo female in that place. Where has that been all my life?
Budgeting on Accommodations
When it comes to accommodation, I always head right on over to BudgetYourTrip.com. There, I'm able to find average accommodation prices for locations and destinations, and specifically countries I'm researching as a whole. It’s so hard to write about a whole entire country in a nine page script, but here we are. For example, budget your trip gives you average prices of hotels that are budget hotels, median hotels, luxury hotels. You can know whether you can splurge here for a hotel on this destination or whether you will need to get a hostel.
Cell Service at your Destination
This next one is specifically helpful for my digital nomads out there. So, to find out how much cell service you need or you're gonna get in a specific region or even an entire country, I use the website nperf.com. On this website, you can enter a country. You can choose a provider. And you can zoom in on their little interactive map to see what level of coverage you'll get in a specific area. This is especially helpful for my folks who are working on the road, etc.
It's also helpful for people who just need to know how much coverage they're going to get in places and if they need to tell people, “I'm going to be out of office”, or, “hi, (family member), you're not going to hear from me since I'm in the woods,” type of thing.
I also use the CIA to help me complete travel research. There's this little thing called the World Fact Book that the CIA has created on every single country in the world. You can visit it and get a brief breakdown of the type of climate, terrain, language, currency, and a bit more information that I have found really helpful. I always feel really cool when I use it.
It's fun to see what they have and If you just need to learn a little bit of quick information about a certain destination you are wanting to go to, specifically a country, they have literally a one to three sentence summary of each of these categories.
To get even more inside travel content advice that I don't share anywhere else, you can subscribe to my free newsletter, The Content Compass. It comes out every Tuesday and is my favorite thing to create. Happy creating!