The Future of Travel Writing

What will we be writing in the next decade? Two seasoned pros make their predictions

Much is written about the future of travel. The papers and magazines and online publications love to make wild predictions about drone taxis, robot concierges and high-tech hotels. But what does the future look like for travel writing? This month, we’re bringing you a four-part series on the future of travel writing, exploring what the editors think our copy will look like in the coming decades, and what experts are predicting about the emergence and growth of AI in the content space.

To start, though, here’s Stuart McDonald and Tim Hannigan on what’s coming for guidebooks, travel memoirs and narrative travel stories…

What does the guidebook* of the future look like?

Stuart McDonald

Waves of alternatives have battered travel writing, be it from social media, online travel agents, or amateur blogs. The latest, an AI wave, the pundits talk up to tsunami proportions. Yet the need for authoritative service writing is more vital than ever.

Consider a legacy guidebook. The front of the book, home to a destination’s history, culture, and environment. The back, the nuts and bolts — reading lists, currency, visas, and language. Between the two, the meat of the sandwich. Listings upon listings on how to arrive, eat, sleep, see, and leave. In the vast majority of cases, the listings will both wither and change. As one who has walked many a street looking at that stuff, I can’t say I’ll miss it.

Why? In an online world, others do it better. There’s no pressing need to go to the bus station when the timetables are online. The vast majority of accommodation options — with live, ever-changing, rates — are online. Travel super app, Google Maps, lists a mind boggling array of places to eat. Across the board, improving filters help readers fine-tune the chaff to meet their desires. You could argue there’s a role for the writer in this filtering, but their time is better spent elsewhere — particularly as AI will gobble up most of this to fuel its more miss than hit regurgitation.

The writer’s role is now to bring a human’s context to the experience—to do what AI cannot. To explain why they should catch the train and not the bus, and never fly domestic. To steer travellers to businesses that are on the true path to sustainable and responsible travel, and to ignore those that never will be. The tourism industry as a whole is blighted by greenwashing — I’ve written in the past on Booking’s high profile yet seriously flawed efforts to profile sustainability — and writers need to step up to assist travellers in making well-informed decisions. 

Readers need more coverage of environmental, social and economic issues, and tourism’s role in these. Travellers should have no excuse to ignore their impacts and say “oh I didn’t know.” Tell travellers when they’re being a part of the problem and teach them how to be a part of the solution.

The guidebook of the future will have different proportions. The front and rear bulked out, with the middle a slither of its old self. Before all else, the non-destination specific core basics of sustainable and responsible travel. A focus of itineraries, with an emphasis on slower, longer trips. No more “see the country in 7-days” gaff, instead, what I call “making time,” where readers learn that to get the most out of a short trip, slowing down works best.

History matters, but we need modern history — what has happened to a place over the last 50 years and what was tourism’s role in that change. A section on places one shouldn’t visit simply because there’s no means to do so responsibly.

Some writers may need to educate themselves. More time researching the challenges in a destination, less time on hotels and wine bars. This is one of the many reasons why writers should be a resident. The days of parachuting in a white guy are over — and yes, it is a white guy telling you this.

Guidebooks need to serve three masters. The traveller, the destination, and the planet itself. This is how it can retain relevance.

*I’m using guidebook as a catchall for all travel service writing, across any medium.

Where are narrative travel books going?

Tim Hannigan

“I do not expect to see many travel books in the near future,” wrote Evelyn Waugh in the preface of When the Going Was Good, an anthology of his own earlier travel writing; “Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport… and feel the world wide open before us.”

This is sometimes mistakenly cited as an early proclamation of the death of travel writing. But Waugh was writing in 1945 in the immediate aftermath of an unprecedented global conflict, when the sort of frivolous journeys he’d written about in the early 1930s no longer seemed possible. By “we” he meant, specifically, his own generation of privileged Britons. Leisure travel and travel writing would one day resurge, he thought, probably amongst “the very young… lean, lawless, aimless couples with rucksacks”. This looks like a prediction of the emergence of my own generation of Lonely Planet-clutching backpackers in the 1990s. And now here I am, the same age as Waugh when he penned those lines, and I do sometimes catch myself looking back nostalgically on my own “good old days” of travel and travel writing. But unlike Waugh, I have a feeling we’ll see plenty of travel books in the near future.

Travel writing has gone in and out of publishing fashion across the decades. It boomed in Waugh’s 1930s heyday, faltered during the turbulence of the 1940s, revived in the 1950s, faded again in the following decade, then resurfaced in the late 1970s, kicking off a fresh boom which only really fizzled out in the early 2000s. We’re surely due for another revival right about now – and I reckon it’s already underway. The first stirrings came ahead of the COVID19 pandemic as high-profile British “nature writers” like Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie started to shift their focus from domestic excursions to foreign journeys. And it’s hardly surprising if a period stuck at home during the pandemic has further encouraged readers and commissioning editors to take an interest in far-off places. The recent raft of high-profile reviews for Tom Parfitt’s High Caucasus, for example, suggests that the literary press thinks travel books are worth paying attention to once more.

Looking back at the genre’s waxing and waning fortunes over the last century, it is possible to identify the evolutions that have come with each resurgence – from a new intellectual seriousness in the 1950s, to a distinct shot of literary cool in the 1980s. Not every travel book follows these evolutionary patterns, of course: the worst books of the 1980s seemed to have progressed little since the 1930s. But those aren’t the ones we remember today. So how might travel writing be evolving in this latest resurgence?

The first — and arguably most important — shift is one of diversity. Travel writing has, notoriously, long been dominated by posh white men, and as recently as 2019, the annual Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards shortlist tended to be very pale, very male and very English. But that seems to have changed with striking rapidity. This year’s shortlist was dominated by women, and the winning book was In the Shadow of the Mountain by the Peruvian mountaineer Silvia Vasquez-Lavado. Elsewhere, at the intersection of travel writing and reportage (and this is always a genre open to literary hybridity), it seems to be emphasising stories that disrupt simple binaries of “East” and “West”. Tharik Hussain’s Minarets in the Mountains drew attention to the Muslim heritage of Southeastern Europe, and Noo Saro-Wiwa’s forthcoming Black Ghosts focuses on the lives of African migrants in China.

Naturally, not every travel book has to directly engage with such themes, and there are still books — like the aforementioned High Caucasus — about the sort of epic personal adventure that has always been a staple of the travel bookshelf. But here too the best recent books seem to have subtly shifted towards self-reflection, a sensitivity around language and otherness, and a checking of authorial privilege that was often missing in the past. Mind you, travel writing has always managed to display those qualities at times. After all, Evelyn Waugh wasn’t really pronouncing travel writing dead in 1945; he was simply acknowledging his own obsolescence in an era of displacement and forced migration, and signalling the need for a new generation of travel writers, better suited to their own era. Plus ça change…

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Tweet of the week

For anyone struggling to get their pitches to land right now, this thread by Suzy Pope will feel very relatable.

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Who to follow

Grace Beard started in September as Time Out’s new travel editor. She also hopped onto our webinar last month — our first ever in collaboration with our good friend Meera Dattani — to discuss all things pitching. Missed it? We’ll be sharing details of where you can buy the download soon.

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Industry must-reads

We’re excited about Jeremy Bassetti’s upcoming book, which he launched on Kickstarter (is this the future of travel book funding?) last month.

This piece by former Sunday Times travel journalist Mark Hodson fits very nicely into this month’s theme. As Lonely Planet celebrates its 50th birthday this month with a swanky do in London, he discusses the books’ transitions from being every backpacker’s bible to their most recent incarnations.

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This is the first email in our series on the future of travel writing. Curious to find out our predictions for the future? Upgrade to a paid subscription to receive all four emails this month.