Blogger FAM trips – are we nearly there yet?!
May 15, 2009 by Ian McKee
Filed under Blog trips
Way back in October I got involved in a debate on Alex Bainbridge’s blog about travel bloggers going on FAM trips. The discussion then seemed to focus on blogger integrity, and whether the acceptance of a ‘free holiday’ put that in jeopardy. My argument at the time was that PRs and traditional journalists have been toeing this line for quite a while, and that if an agreement has been reached between them, then surely one could be found with bloggers.
Self confessed ‘Old Hand’ travel writer Paul Mansfield explains in this great article on the truth about press trips that “few if any publications have the resources to send writers away, so instead they accept hospitality from tour operators, hotels, airlines and tourist boards in exchange for coverage.” A key commentor in the debate that raged on Alex’s blog was Darren Cronian, AKA Travel Rants, and we all know his stance against FAM trips has only hardened since! Both Darren and Alex are prolific and influential travel bloggers, but neither are (or have been) journalists, and so have had no prior experience of the media to tourist board/hotel/tour operator relationship that Paul Mansfield speaks of. (Not that either would need to, they both offer quite different editorial insights to the kind of travel features you might find in a newspaper or magazine and really, I can see why a FAM trip wouldn’t really be appropriate for either.)
So, step forward Jeremy Head, a seasoned travel journalist, editor and broadcaster with several years in the travel media industry and now blogger, too. Someone who can see both sides of the coin perhaps? Jeremy seemed a little shocked when we called him to invite him to Sydney on a FAM trip purely on the strength of his blog, so much so that he went and posted about it. The thing is, it wasn’t his ‘integrity’ stopping him from accepting (if you read the comments you’ll see that he and other bloggers come up with fairly easy ways of getting around that), it was his working diary. A trip to Sydney would take 7 – 10 days out of his time, for no monetary benefit. That in itself is unfeasible for Jeremy, but imagine if he was trying to make his blog a full time occupation! The issue once again comes back to money, and the comments from my colleague James Allen on Jeremy’s post pretty much run the idea of the PR/travel client funding blogger FAM trips into the ground too.
So, where to from here?
Jeremy also helpfully directed our attention to the US, with this post from travel writer Tim Leffel. Tim makes some very good points about how the travel PR and marketing industry needs to wake up to the influence of the web (though reading it myself I felt a little like a convert being preached to…). My comment there brings up the issue of the differences between the UK and the US. Though there I talk about how we can geographically target an audience online it’s also relevant to the payment debate we have here. The US has Gridskipper, Gadling, Jaunted, Worldhum – all established travel blogs which are professionally run, and presumably PAY their writers. That would get around the issue of PRs/travel organisations funding blogger trips wouldn’t it, if they were paid by the blog themselves? It would also solve the clunky ‘this post is sponsored by’ integrity issue.
So when are we getting a great UK based professional travel blog then? As an agency we’ve had quite a few information and even trip requests lately from journalists (many of whom we are already aware of as professional travel writers) claiming to be writing for something called Simon Seeks, which you’ll see has a holding page here. Apparently the site has heavyweight financial backing from the owners of moneysupermarket.com.
Could this be the first great professional UK based travel blog site? I certainly hope so, and reckon by the strength of the writers we know are writing for it that it should be. That said I also hope it isn’t the only one. Lets hope it sparks a whole UK based travel blog scene with the richness, integrity and intelligence that the established UK travel media already has.
In the meantime, any travel bloggers out there fancy an (unpaid) FAM trip? Just let us know and we’ll see what we can do.
Nicely written article. Wish more people would pick up on the subject and submit articles. Well done and great that you Twitter.
Hi Ian
It’s an interesting debate… I’ve a few ideas about how to make it work… which I will share on my blog soon…
In the meantime… Simonseeks… I’ve written a few bits for them. For now the pay is very very minimal… but they are offering a decent cut of the ad revenue… so maybe that will help. Personally I wouldn’t set up a press trip just to write them a feature at this moment in time. But they are definitely commissioning a lot of content so they are serious in their intent.
It will be very interesting to see how they do it… note the tag line – travel guides for you, by you. So it’s definitely not purely professional content…
Thanks for the kind comments etc
Jeremy
In the US there are travel blogger’s who receive freebies and go on FAM trips and write about it on their blog. The problem I have with this is that it’s very one-sided, in that it’s ‘oh this product is really good it does xyz’ rather than being impartial and say ‘oh this is good, but I would like it to do xyz’ or something along those lines.
My blog gets a lot of invites for FAM trips, website promotions and product reviews (interestingly, even more since I ranted about it) but it’s not that type of blog, you cannot review a product or write about a FAM trip when you are writing about the negative aspects of the travel industry.
From the emails received people do not want you write negativity, but want it all fluffed up.
When I tell family and friends that I turn these down they go mad with me.
Funnily enough though I am working on a destination ‘blog come magazine’ that I will be launching later this year, but that would not change my opinion on FAM trips. Ideally, I want to have content that is written by people who have visited off their own back, not read them in a guidebook or online.
If you’d like to see a preview of the site let me know, happy to show you my plans for it, but its still very much work in progress.
@maps4pets Thank you! I think Tweeting is pretty much a bare minimum for a PR agency these days.
@Jeremy Thanks for the extra insight on SimonSeeks. I suppose an entirely professional and vehemently commercial blog project is a bit of a contradiction in terms really, so probably best that it won’t be entirely professional content. Either way we shall watch eagerly. Look forward to hearing about your ideas too
@Darren In my opinion, the established travel media in the US can be a bit more one sided than that in the UK, which is why I mentioned the integrity of our media. I’d hope (and expect) that a serious UK travel blog scene would be more impartial than that in the US too.
Your blog/magazine project sounds really interesting, would love to know more! Sounds like we can’t PR you on that project, but in all seriousness we would be interested in helping out without the expectation of any fluffing up.
Darren spotlights the key issues perfectly (it’s hard to speak your mind negatively if you are a guest – especially if your publication is called ‘Travel Rants’) but, with respect Darren, these are issues we’ve been dealing with for years (the British Guild of Travel Writers, of which both Paul Mansfield, Jeremy & I are/were* members have been talking about this for 50 years).
As Ian and his colleagues in the travel PR sector know, we are WAY more independent…no, let’s call a spade a spade… UK travel journalists are WAY more arsey than their overseas colleagues when it comes to evaluating travel product/destinations, but all the same, maybe not always as arsey as they would like to be because in the real world, editors and other interested parties get involved and criticism gets diluted or winds up being inferred or implied by what is ‘not’ said.
So, should professional travel writers be ignored?
No, because they have the one thing citizen reviewers don’t have – perspective. Eg, a reviewing customer experiences only one room in a hotel. A reviewing travel journo sees the range of rooms from the best suite to the standard single. He/she knows the history of the hotel, knows the manager’s problems and ambitions for the hotel, and knows what, on another continent, the hotel chain’s vice-president is planning.
Neither view (that of the ‘punter’ or the journo) is superior, but neither is inferior.
Ian made the same Oz offer to me a few days ago, and my reaction was the same as Jeremy’s – absolutely I’d like to go and cover it! I’d love to wave my microphone (and video camera) around in Australia again. But, not without profitable commissions.
There is nothing new in all this. Nothing has changed. PRs need ROI on investment. Journos need to sell their copy. The landscape in which we work may be changing, but the basic rules remain the same.
*Ian, no biggy, but you should know that Paul Mansfield died earlier this year, and is much missed by many of his friends in the guild.
Thanks Alastair, I wasn’t aware of that about Paul Mansfield, or I would have mentioned it. I didn’t know him personally but I know he was a very well respected writer.
The ‘punter’ perspective you talk of being also relevant and that Darren seems to be looking to give voice to, is of course important. It’s not even new really – people always talked to each other about their holidays, recommended hotels to their friends, just now they can do it in many and varied ways to more people over the internet. And so the professional perspective you speak of is still serving the same purpose for the reasons you give.
I guess people like Jeremy and yourself have a good perspective on the changing landscape because you’ve had experience of the original, and you’ve adapted quickly to the new. It’s just exciting to see where we can go within it.
Actually, another post from Every Dot Connects sums up some of things we can expect pretty well – http://everydotconnects.com/2009/04/14/a-different-breed-what-to-expect-from-bloggers/
Hi Ian,
Thanks for your post, and for the references to my Every Dot Connects work. Yes, we are already there for blogger-focused fam trips, at least in the US.
I went on one to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia two years ago, I just came back from a small-town-focused one to Hutchinson, Kansas last month, and at the end of this month, I head to Hawaii with about nine other bloggers under the auspices of the Hawaii Tourism Authority.
The material that I gather from these trips goes into many different blogs (not just my travel ones) and is also pitched to those publications that accept material from “comped” travel. So many people don’t even realize that US national-level glossies like “National Geographic Traveler,” “Conde Nast Traveler” and “Budget Travel” do not allow articles based on comped travel. The idea is that their pay rates (US$1/word and up) make it worth the writer’s while to pay for everything up front and reimburse oneself later when the check comes in.
I will come right out and say that Darren Cronian is right; you cannot say you are totally, totally objective when your destination is handed to you on a platter. I would LOVE to have the funds to do it “right” – completely anonymous, paid out of my own pocket, researched on my own and not supported by local tourism PR any more than any other traveler who calls/rings up the office and asks for help.
The fact is, I cannot always operate that way, and it does bother me. So, I try to use the freedom offered by my blog outlets to be as objective and fair as I can possibly be, given my own ethics compass, and ALWAYS disclose that my material is coming from a sponsored press trip. I even blog about my discomfiture, as other writers above have done.
Thank you for bringing up the “days of lost income” issue. People think, ooh, Hawaii, what a deal she’s getting. No, in the basic sense, it is 10 days when I am writing free content for the Hawaii state tourism board. I have lived in Hawaii and other beautiful places; I am not starry-eyed about “paradise.” My 9-year-old son will accompany me since I’m covering family travel and want to test all this on an actual human child. I love my kid, but he ain’t a vacation.
So why am I doing it? Ah, there is method in my madness. There are stories that I can write from Hawaii that have nothing to do with travel, per se, so the comped travel problem won’t be a factor (I have a space geek story idea for WIRED magazine out of the Kansas trip, believe it or not.) More importantly, I am beginning to focus my social media consulting business on what I call “Tourism 2.0″ – teaching Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus/tourism organizations how to use the social Web to reach potential visitors and help with economic development. I will gather ROI data and other things from the Hawaii trip to help build my business.
My plan is that someday soon, I’ll make enough money from this sort of consulting that I WILL be able to travel my way – independently, unfettered and able to pitch to any publication. The only reason I’ll contact a destination’s tourism/PR folks will be as “Joe/Jane Six-Pack” regular traveler, to test how responsive they are to visitor requests.
In sum, I think tourism organizations are missing the boat if they are not reaching out to bloggers. I coach/advise/consult and tell them to do it. What’s tough for me is that when they DO reach out to a blogger, but it’s ME, I’ll play but I’m not particularly comfortable with it.
The good news is that I’m mining all of this for still more blog post material. Everything I just wrote in this comment will be re-purposed.
I would love to go on a fam trip. But the kind of fam trip I would like to go on would be to meet interesting people doing interesting things on the online travel space. No one invites me to those kind of things……
I remember working for a hotel distribution company and going to hotels for fam trips. Rather than agents doing room tours (looking at all room style combinations) we used to spend time going to the incoming reservations team etc and finding out what they do…. so product based fam trips are, as you correctly point out, not my thing. But business process based fam trips I have found very interesting in the past.
My big wonder at the moment is whether can get press passes at various travel industry conferences! They tend to come with coverage conditions that I find somewhat tricky to comply with…..
@Sheila Actually CN Traveller in the UK doesn’t do comp travel either – they do accept discounted rates but won’t accept a free trip in the interests of editorial integrity. The Independent’s travel editor-at-large Simon Calder is the only other case of a UK travel writer I’m aware of who insists on paying (his moniker is ‘the Man Who Pays His Way’).
I like your approach building other revenue streams for yourself into your trips, and understand how accepting a free trip could make you feel uncomfortable. I don’t think every blogger in the world will be able to do the same though, will they? I suppose it’s always going to be case by case.
@Alex That makes sense. Anyone wants a trip that’s tailored to their own interests. Do you really have trouble getting press passes?? That really surprises me – perhaps conference organisers need to wake up to the importance of bloggers and the web too!
I’m the editor of the UK based Europe a la Carte Blog, an online Europe travel magazine. The whole issue of blogger fam trips is a minefield. I’d only accept a fam trip if it was agreed from the outset that I can write an honest appraisal of the destination. However as Sheila says can you ever be 100% objective about a free trip? Yes Sheila, I too, would prefer to be able to fund my own trips but we are talking about living the real world.
I do believe that gushing, totally postive reviews from bloggers don’t even ring true with readers who I reckon, on the whole, can judge if a piece gives a reasonable evaluation of destination.
It seems to me that in the UK, travel blogs are finally going mainstream, judging by an increasing number of emails from PR companies in my in-box. Yet some PR companies are still fixated on print media circulation figures and may dismiss a blog on the grounds that its readership figues stack up unfavourably against print media. What the doubters they need to reaslise is that the traffic to a blog post is highly targetted compared to one article in a newspaper or magazine.
Only just came across this… It’s a very interesting minefield.
I fit into the ‘writer who is tipping toes into the blogging water but writes a lot of web content’ bracket. As a general rule, I hate group fam trips, and much prefer to organise them on an individual basis. But I’ll only do othat if I’m going to make enough money from the resulting articles to more than cover the time and cost of going on the trip.
Most bloggers don’t earn money from their blog – they do it as a shop window so that they can get things off their chest or earn money elsewhere.
To go on a press trip just to do a blog entry? It’s just not financially viable, irrespective of whether the topic fits the blog.
Where it would possibly work is if other commissions could be lined up on the back of it. I occasionally do this with web pieces I’m writing – if the PR firm is happy with a couple of hundred words in a top ten list that I’m writing anyway, then awesome. I did this in the Caribbean earlier this year – the PR firm wanted coverage on the online outlet, but my prime aim was selling other stories whilst gathered there to print outlets. If I can have my costs covered, then pretty much everyone wins.
But I was going there anyway, and the online piece just happened to cover where I was going. Not a case of specifically going there FOR the online piece.
It would be interesting to see what would happen, however, if the destinations were prepared to take out advertising on the blogs. A Fam trip to Sydney, plus £500 of advertising for the site starts to get a little more interesting…