The demise of the general travel blogger?

By Steve Keenan

Bad news for generalists: the niche travel blogger is in demand for 2013.

It’s a trend that has been around for some months: now it is accelerating, with several manifestations at Tbex in Girona recently.

Jaume Marin, marketing director of the Costa Brava Girona Tourist Board, told me he is on the lookout for mummy travel bloggers for next year, amongst other specialist sectors.

“We are looking at wine, mums and fashion trips - We want engagement with their communities. It is the end of the general things.”

Whoah, Jaume. But he went on. “First, bloggers were not very well known. Then they got a profile. But not everyone is Gary Arndt who can make a living from that. Some of them are very young, they want to be independent but they have to learn that they have to be bloggers and marketeers.

But Jaume, a well-established social media authority among tourist boards, has some crumbs of comfort for general travel bloggers. “The good thing for them is that there are so many tourist boards that haven’t even started. They can talk to them.”

Gary Arndt has long argued that bloggers should stop looking to their community for self-help, but address their real audience - the travelling public. But even that isn’t enough, according to Jaume and other Tbex attendees.

Jill Lloyd of Expedia spoke about wanting to work with more bloggers but made a thinly-disguised plea for specialists. “People-shaped travel is what we talk about in Europe,” she said.

“People have different needs for different reasons, you leave a place with different set of ideas and stories…,” she added - or, in other words, there’s a lot of difference among travellers, and Expedia would like bloggers who represent those differing strands.

There are, of course, many successful general travel bloggers such as David Whitley, Andy Jarosz and Matthew Teller - but they tend to mix blogging with writing for established media and other paid work.

But those travel bloggers working almost purely off their blogs are the ones who stand to be marginalised. Ryan Levitt of Housetrip is not a man to mince words. And he didn’t either in Girona. He’s another after mummy travel bloggers, among other niche writers. His company doesn’t give, er, tuppence for Twitter and he expects a 3.6% ratio of Facebook people talking about a page to Likes.

Certainly, the number of Likes and Twitter followers has diminished in importance in 2012, with quality over quantity a common mantra. The demand for more qualified, more specialist ‘storyteller’ bloggers was something I first heard about in the summer from Flanders, when it looked for writers to attend festivals.

The region was helped in its search by Vancouver-based Think! Social Media, from where chief strategist William Bakker told TravelPerspective in May: “Flanders is the perfect client for us. By selecting bloggers based on their personal passion and matching them with an event they will love, the word will spread amongst people that care. And because of the diversity in festivals, you need a lot of bloggers to cover a lot of passions. Flanders wasn’t afraid to do that.”