How Does Travel Blogging Fit Into the Travelogue Tradition?

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 10.27.11 | 2:25 PM ET

Travelogues progressed along a more or less linear path in the twentieth century. Although aeroplanes brought a new kind of fragmentation and the size of the travel industry ballooned, great writers continued travelling and, in magazines, a new, glossy format for descriptions and photographs from a journey was found. The twenty first century has been far more disruptive. The first blogs led quickly to the first travel blogs, instead of the first online travelogues. It was a new medium and perhaps it made sense to use a new name, but instead of marking an upward progression, the phrase travel blog is associated with a feeble form of one of the world’s oldest narrative traditions.

This prejudice is, in the majority of cases, completely justified. Too many travel blogs are facile when they are not fatuous. Blogs that function like letters to friends and family should, perhaps, be excused - even if some of the most readable travelogues of the past two centuries started life as a series of letters - but there are now well over a thousand travel blogs that actively seek an audience, and most of them are depressingly poor. They describe interactions with the travel industry instead of the larger world and are, as a result, like reading badly edited, first person Lonely Planet guides. They are self-reductive, confining their narratives to keywords popular on Google, like solo, solo female, family travel, eco-travel and round the world, which is aptly abbreviated to RTW, because most of these whistle stop gallivants are themselves extremely abbreviated. They are light on history, politics and context in general, but heavy on technically proficient but clichéd photography and vacuous best-of lists. The worst are self-congratulatory and patronising, written with enough gall to inform readers that they too can travel, usually along the same dismal beaten track as the blogger. Most of all - and most of the time - travel blogs are badly written. To capture an audience that browses instead of reading, blog posts must be short, easy to consume and frequent. As a result, there are both good and bad writers with insipid and tedious travel blogs.