Travelblather

I'm in the stunning city of Seville updating my Frommer’s Day by Day guide to the city. As you know, this is the first time I’ve updated a guidebook, so there’s a bit of a learning curve. But something happened yesterday I hadn’t expected.

On one of my Seville walking tours I've included a traditional coffee shop called La Campana. All my walking tours need to include at least one spot to take the weight off your feet and have a drink and a bite. This place is Seville’s oldest coffee and cake shop, full of ornate chiller cabinets filled with beautifully arranged rows of colourful cakes and sugary sweets. It trades on its reputation a bit and is pricey compared to several other places, but the location is picture perfect – on a bustling street corner in the shade. You can sit at your table on the pavement and watch the world go by as waistcoated waiters pour you a coffee or a fresh juice and bring you your yummy cake.

And it’s exactly halfway round my walking tour too. So... a bit touristy, but actually pretty perfect for what I need.

Except, I and my wife (who has been here with me for a couple of days) bought some cakes there yesterday. We brought them back to my apartment. And Karen found a COCKROACH! in her cake. (‘Look on the bright side’ I told her – ‘at least it wasn’t half a cockroach!’)

But joking aside it presents me with serious issues. What should I do?

1) Drop the place completely?
As a rule with a guidebook where space is at an absolute premium, you don’t give a place a bad review. If it’s not good, you just don’t include it – there’s simply not room to write about the bad places.

2) Mention it, but give it a bad review
Despite this, it is Seville’s most famous coffee shop – it will be in every other guidebook to the city. Leaving it out could look like a glaring omission. I absolutely can’t keep it in my walking tour as a recommended refreshment stop if I am not 100% sure it’s good. These stops are supposed to be places I have carefully selected as special. An added problem is that, due to the way the format of the guidebook works, the only place I can easily include a coffee shop in the book is as a walking tour refreshment stop. There are listings chapters for Bars, Restaurants, Shops and Hotels, but this place doesn’t really fit into any of these sections very easily. (Perhaps I could put it in 'Shops'? That might work.)

3) Mention it without discussing the cockroach
Maybe this was just a one-off? After all, they have been making and serving cakes here for literally centuries. Plenty of other satisfied customers - many of them regular locals. Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt? Keep it in the walking tour.

4) Mention it but say something opaque
So, they were having an off day maybe – perhaps I mention La Campana but make it clear I’m not mad keen on the place. Say something about ‘lovely location, but the cakes are a bit sweet and overpriced in my opinion’ or similar. But can I keep it in the walking tour if I do this? I’m not at all sure.

5) Give them a chance to resolve the problem
You might well be saying I should tell the manager of the place about the problem and give him an opportunity to resolve it. I probably would do in the UK – but my Spanish is awful and (more important) there is no proof the cockroach came from their cake. I could just be saying this to make life difficult for them. (It’s a big shame we didn’t eat the cake at the shop!) I have plenty of friends here who are Spanish, so I could get them to help me explain the problem. And I might.

So – what would you do? How do you strike a balance between a one-off unfortunate experience and needing a certain type of place to fit a particular kind of guidebook format?

Scroll down to comment #21 to see my update on what happened when I went to confront the manager - cockroach in hand (well in a bag actually)

Interesting salvo of activity in the last couple of days. I got an email from Mark Hodson who knows a thing or two about travel SEO (there Mark you owe me a link) as well as being a respected travel writer. Along with another of the Sunday Times regular travel writers David Wickers, he set up 101holidays earlier this year.

It's a simple, clean site that aims to offer an easy to navigate list of carefully selected tour operators for people in the 'inspiration phase' of looking for a holiday. It's one of a new breed of websites that's evolving from the chaotic stew of on-line travel content sites that travel writers are creating or contributing to in the hope of somehow earning an income from their trade now that print is more or less dead. I reviewed 101holidays in an earlier post.

And it must be relatively successful as they've now launched companion site 101shortbreaks. (Bets on what will come next? Chaps I sincerely hope you have bought the domain names for... 101cruiseholidays, 101skiholidays etc.) Mark I think(?) would be the first to admit that the site makes money by charging the 101 operators an annual fee to be featured on the site. As I understand it this is the main way that Alastair Sawday makes his money - all the hotels featured in his guidebooks/website pay to be included. (If I'm wrong here, I'd be delighted to be corrected.)

At the same time, Matthew Teller posted on his blog about a way he is experimenting with to try and earn income as a travel writer. He suggested to two editors of online travel sections of newspapers that as they didn't have budget to pay him, he would ask the tourist board of the country he was travelling to if they would pay him instead. Both editors refused the idea, suggesting that it would undermine their credibility. I commented on Matthew's blog that I'd just do the deal with the tourist board and not tell the editor concerned. I fail to see the difference between the tourist board paying for a travel writer to stay in hotels, dine in restaurants (it often comes out of their marketing budget rather than the establishment absorbing the cost) and paying the writer some additional 'expenses' for his time. The editor remains totally free to edit and revise any copy submitted.

Interestingly the Federal Trade Commission in the USA has recently ruled that "bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service." (eg: you get a free night in a hotel, you need to make this clear if you then review it.) This has caused all sorts of debate in the blogosphere - both for and against. Does this suggest a future where every travel feature on-line requires a disclaimer at the end of it?

And... are we so far down the line... with so much of travel sections these days being written off the back of press trips which are organised specifically to push a particular product from a particular company - that it really makes no difference anyway?

If you follow my twitter feed, you'll know that I'm one of the columnists for new travel tech media website Tnooz. Agreeing to do this gig took some thinking. I get no remuneration for doing it (yet). And you know how much I HATE free. Shouldn't I stick with what I'm doing on Travelblather instead? Writing for Tnooz though gets me a far bigger audience - which is nice - and a degree of credibility that I didn't have before.

My first post on Tnooz evoked quite a lot of comments - it's titled The Internet Is Ruining Travel Journalism. One of the comments was from Christine Gilbert - who writes an interesting blog called Almost Fearless. (In July 2008 she quit her high-powered job, sold her stuff and dedicated herself to travelling and blogging about her experiences.)

Her comment on my post (slightly abridged - underlining mine):

.... your personal site, (ie this one, Travelblather) could be making you $1000/mo. You’re a great writer, you have the credentials and you write interesting posts. So why aren’t you one of the most popular travel writing blogs out there? Well it’s on typepad, you don’t update often enough and you need a new design. If you networked a bit with other bloggers, then you’d start building a loyal and rabid following. Heck, when you do post everyone comes running… but you don’t take it seriously as a way to make money.

That’s the problem with all travel journalists who complain about the internet– they don’t actually take it seriously. Meanwhile, people with no journalism background are building sites and doing well, because they think about it completely differently.

Some challenges, some nice compliments and some pertinent advice. I do actually take what I write here really seriously. That's partly why I don't post that often. I only want to say stuff, when I feel it's worth saying. I take time to write posts. Partly I think because I am a journo at heart, I craft stuff and tinker with it more than perhaps I need to. Do I think about this blog differently from someone like Christine? That's a really interesting question for consideration sometime... Does having a more focussed financial imperative mean the content suffers? I honestly don't know. (Interestingly Christine doesn't run ads on her blog - instead she chooses to let people make a donation via Paypal should they want to.)

Sure I'd really like this blog to earn me that $1000 a month. I do wonder if Christine really is earning $1000 a month in donations - but she has over 3000 readers subscribed to her RSS feed and 30,000 followers on Twitter... so maybe she does.

I have no idea how to monetize this blog... I use Google adwords and that gets me about $2 a month.

Other bloggers in this space are clearly thinking along similar lines.

Christine seems to suggest in her comment that it's about posting more, using a better platform (ie Wordpress) and networking. Is that really all it takes? (Actually, that could be a lot of work - networking could be a full time job I guess.)

So... can anyone help me? If someone can help me migrate this blog to Wordpress (keeping the current URL structure so I don't lose links) and show me how to set up proper advertising deals or find other ways to earn income I will share revenue from the site 50:50 for the first 6 months. Assuming Christine's numbers are correct that would equate to around $3000.(Heck if they really do help me I'll share income for the first couple of years. Seriously.)

Assuming anyone is prepared to share their secrets of monetization... I'll of course post about it here. (Unless they are so fantastic I become RICH.... Cue manic laughter, fade to black etc.)