What Makes a Travel Writer?

For those who would love to travel and write, the What Makes a Travel Writer? infographic from hotelclub.com is the infographic for you. This infographic covers the ages and careers of these writers, and also what technology they use.

If you’ve ever wanted to become a travel writer, you’ve probably wondered about the tools and resources the pros use to make their jobs possible. The trade secrets of those who successfully turn international adventures into paychecks are an enticing mystery. Does the key lie in social networking? Is it finding the right technology that makes all the difference? Or have these professionals stumbled onto some obscure websites that the rest of us are ignorant about?

Unfortunately, there isn’t one explicit answer that will transform you into a travel writer overnight. It is a combination of all of these things that enable the professionals to do their jobs well enough to afford a warm meal and their next plane ticket.

So to gain some insight into the tricks of the trade, and hopefully get you one step closer to your dream job, we surveyed some of the best travel writers on the web about their working habits. We got the scoop on Twitter from three of the most ‘Followed’ travel tweeters in the business (@Paul_Steele, @TravelEditor, and @DaveDTC); found out that Paris and NYC are two of the best places in the world to find (marketable) inspiration; and were warned against going any where near Birmingham or Malaga.

Find out what else we learned in our detailed infographic.

I really like this design.  I like that the infographic keeps the same, simple color scheme throughout to match the colors in the header. However, it lacks a border or a background color to help frame the infographic on a webpage with a white background.  The white background creates uncertainty of where it actually ends.

Most of the information is in percentages; however, it is all conveyed in different visual formats.  The stacked bars, pie charts and doughnut graphs correctly show them in comparison to the complete 100%.  The partially shaded shaped of film canisters, people icons and the world map aren’t quite correct.  The readers see the area colored of an object, and because of the odd shapes the designer had to guess the correct shading by just changing the height.  It’s close, but not actually correct.

A few other suggestions I would make:

• The two age groups compared with the man & woman icons aren’t related to each other, so the comparison isn’t helpful information.

• For the Male-Female comparison comparison in Travel Career, the icons need to be the same width for them the be accurate. Visually it looks like 75% is at least double 53%, which obviously isn’t true.

• The Tablet Brands statistics of “100% of male travelers use Amazon Kindle” isn’t support by the data to the left, and is a highly unbelievable stat.

• When lining up rows of icons, like in Blogging Platforms, the design should always use rows of 10 icons.

• I’m sure the last circle in the Twitter Usage section was supposed to be <100 Twitter followers instead of >100.

• There should be a URL at the end of the infographic linking to the original full-size version.

Thanks to Ally for sending in the link!