The demise of Travel Blogging

I started this blog in 2013 when I went on my first long term backpacking trip. All I wanted to do was write about my adventures, a blog of my travels. A diary, a journal, a record, somewhere to store my memories and experiences and a way to share them with friends and family back home.

Before I started that trip I did a lot of research online. Reading other peoples blogs was a great way to get a feel of what to expect in unfamiliar places. Personal experiences of how things really are that you couldn’t find in Lonely Planet guides. What I might experience from the various cultures I would be encountering. Travel blogs were exciting back then. They were inspirational and informative and above all honest accounts of real experiences.

Back when I was planning my trip on the Trans-Siberian it was easy to find others personal accounts of their time aboard this epic train journey. A simple search of the internet brought back dozens of great stories that covered the good the bad and the ugly side of traveling on this famous route. Now if I perform that same search it returns pages of standardized guides most likely written by AI and a never ending supply of overpriced guided tour offers. 

The Travel Blog world has transformed into an unrecognisable beast of influencers and revenue streams. Soulless standardised content that offers no substance or personality.

I was recently in Hoi An in Vietnam and I wanted to find out what good motorbike trips we could do out of the town and into the countryside. The results I got were not what I was hoping for.

What I got was a mix of tour companies offering their own pillion trips through Vietnam and a few of the most popular Travel Bloggers articles.

I delved into a few of the blogs to see what I could find and it was numbing uninspired generic nonsense. I hoped for some personal accounts of which routes might be fun to do. Which roads offered some great views or maybe some lesser known villages that had some crazy Shaman guy offering to remove the evil spirits from you with his chanting and special herbal tea.

Instead the posts from these ‘popular’ bloggers were formulated nonsense, following a set layout packed with information I didn’t need or want. ‘How to get to Hoi An – the nearest airport is located in…..’   ‘When to visit Hoi An – the best time to visit is…..’  Eventually after scrolling down an endless list of non-relevant info I found a small paragraph with an affiliate link to some corporate tour company offering bike trips from Hoi An to Hue. I felt dejected by the whole experience.

It seems we have evolved into a space where people seek out autonomous guidance when they travel and there are no end of creators willing to deliver them that. Why do all your own research when TripAdvisor or a popular blog can tell you where to visit, where to stay and which coffee shop is the most Instagram worthy for you to take photos and impress your mates back home. I see some people traveling now and I swear they only experience the trip through the camera of their smartphone. Travel for some has become a tick-list of what the internet tells them they should do. What’s happened to real life spontaneous experiences and adventure?

I realise the Travel Blogging landscape has evolved and moved on, that’s natural, but it’s how it’s evolved that concerns me. The rise of social media, influencers and a constant thirst for revenue on these platforms have shaped where we are today. There are masses of people now who aspire to become rich and famous from traveling the world. 

When I started thinking about this topic a few weeks ago I did a little digging through some of the most popular travel blogs online right now. It really highlighted the demise of good writing and story telling. It showed how revenue and advertising has moved into the space and taken over like an unwanted squatter.

I chose probably the most well known Travel Blog out there right now and read through a few of their oldest posts first. They were brilliant, absolute Blogging gold. Stories of being stabbed in Columbia and how the locals saved them. Amazing times on Koh Lipe back when it was just a few bamboo huts to stay in and you would go out on a boat with the owner to help catch the fish for dinner that night. Crazy gun totting taxi drivers in Bolivia trying to sell them cocaine. it was packed with really interesting genuine stories that were inspiring, engaging and oozed character and personality.

As I moved through their history you could see how it evolved to where it is now. Now it is the standardized guide style that I speak of. Most of the articles are written by guest writers who seem to be following a set template for each entry or using AI to generate influencer style content packed with far too many superlatives.

I don’t begrudge anyone for being successful with their travel blogging. Would I want to be successful with our blog and generate some income to help us sustain our travels? Absolutely, I would take that right now thank you very much. What I wouldn’t do is compromise our writing in favour of making money. I will never use AI to generate any of our content. I wont succumb to following a set template just because ‘it works’ and generates traffic to the site. Our blog will always be honest and personal and hopefully enjoyable to anyone who stumbles across it.

Despite all this there are still some great travel blogs and writers out there with fantastic inspiring tales of adventure. Some people still have a good honest story to tell. But sadly it’s getting much harder to find them without digging deep down your search engines results. They are becoming lost in a sea of Google rankings and Search Engine Optimisation. Revenue is now king and good writing is becoming a thing of the past.

I really hope that Travel Blogging as I know and love it doesn’t become extinct. I have hope that as with many things in this ever changing world of ours that it becomes relevant again. That things are cyclic and a new generation will shun what big tech and algorithms are telling them they need to see and experience. That people will seek out real content and realise that AI and other tools can never fully replace nor replicate what we are capable of as individuals.