Travelblather

My own trumpet that is, I blogged yesterday about how I was due to appear on Channel 5’s the Hotel Inspector. If you watched it, I’m sorry for the doubtless huge disappointment you suffered when I failed to feature in even a second of the hour-long show. This despite the fact that I travelled across half the damn country to get there, stayed a night in that hole, spent hours walking round the hotel with the film crew filming sequences where I tried out beds, snooped around bathrooms and more, ate a sad Chinese meal on my own in Tewkesbury because the rest of the film crew were staying in Cheltenham, got up stupidly early to film a load more footage, talked to my own personal handycam in the room, did a whole series of interviews with Sarah and Ralph who ran the place. And to think the bxggers initially refused to pay me a bean for appearing saying it was giving me and the guidebook brand I was notionally representing good exposure! I did at least screw £200 quid out of them (though the invoice remains unpaid.)

For the record I WAS on the hotel inspector. I featured for about a minute in the ‘behind the scenes’ show that went out on Fiver immediately after the show. They referred to me as ‘fellow hotel heavyweight Jeremy NORTH’! Bunch of arse! They couldn’t even get my name right! I am so glad I gave up freelancing.

Moral of the story... Don't blow your trumpet until you know what the rest of the orchestra are up to?

Ok... so no one else will blow it for me... I'm appearing as an expert on C5's The Hotel Inspector tonight (Thurs 24th July) at 9pm. Assuming they haven't cut me to bits I am providing advice and feedback to the owners of the Jessop House Hotel in Tewkesbury.

I had to tell them if in my opinion as a guidebook writer their hotel would merit inclusion in a guide.  Ralph and Sarah who own and run the hotel (pictured) were really nice people and very committed to the business. But they were feeling the pinch financially. They'd cut corners on renovation and whilst some of their rooms were really pretty good, others were in serious need of updating. I told them that I wouldn't be able to include their hotel in a guidebook in its current state. I wonder if they found the money to do the rest of the rooms up?

I blogged a few weeks back about Typepad's new compose editor and how for me it was so slow I couldn't use it. There's now a 'simple view' option which I guess has less of the HMTL options built into it which makes things significantly better. What I've also noticed is that using my far newer and more powerful laptop the compose editor performs pretty well even with the full functionality switched on. It raises interesting questions about your approach to software upgrades. What assumptions do you make about the age and power of the PCs that people will use to access your software? It's something that you have no control over and yet it can have a massive impact on user satisfaction. From my totally unstatistically valid user group experience of one (ie just me) Typepad got it wrong this time. Additionally I wonder if I need all the extra whistles and bells that are slowing down my experience anyway? Almost certainly not.

And then someone just suggested using Microsoft's Live Writer to post to Typepad instead.So I'm going to give that a try... Will be interesting to see how it compares...

So, after seven years of freelancing... and getting increasingly hacked off with the lousy pay (which eventually no amount of visits to amazing places can offset) I've joined the ranks of the fully employed. I'm really excited about my new job as Travel Editor for smart web marketing company iCrossing. 

I'm responsible for putting together a team of brilliant freelance travel writers to create genuinely useful travel content for a number of big travel clients. Doubtless I'll post plenty in coming weeks about the challenges of doing this - remaining true to writing unbiased content for a readership, despite the subtle pressures from the client to sell, sell, sell. It's going to be a fascinating debate.

For now though I'm just getting used to no longer being freelance. It felt particularly odd the first week being in a busy, buzzy office environment. It also made me wonder about this blog. Now I'm someone else in the real world - with different allegiances and goals - who am I on-line? I've changed the 'About Me' details to make it clear that I now work for someone. How do I manage my on-line personalities compared with my real world ones? I have my personal website which was a shop window for my work as a freelance journalist and broadcaster. What should I do with it now? And do I need to change the focus of the blog? Will the fact that I now work for someone mean I can no longer be consider unbiased? Will people read what I say in a different light? I guess the only way to find out is to keep blogging and see...

I've just returned from a writing trip to the lovely Douro valley in Portugal. It's a totally beautiful landscape - a winding river sparkling in the summer sunlight, flanked by steeply terraced, vine-covered hillsides.

I was on the train back to Porto and there was an old chap sat opposite me. He bought a can of drink from the guy with the trolley who was walking down the aisle. When he'd finished it, he opened the window and chucked it out. I was totally gob-struck. Here was this beautiful scenery and he was slinging rubbish out of the window without a second thought. It was the way he did it too - as if he was doing us other passengers a service by getting rid of the rubbish. It struck me how for me at least that kind of behaviour is these days totally outrageous and unacceptable, but no one else in the carriage seemed even vaguely bothered... If I'd been in the UK - on home territory - I might have said something, but being a foreignor in a foreign land I stayed silent. Would you?