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Latest news from A Luxury Travel Blog (Q1, 2022)

Hello readers! I haven’t written an update in a while so I thought I would just do a post with some latest news from the blog. TravMedia Awards First off, I’m delighted to report that A Luxury Travel Blog has been shortlisted for another award. We’ve been lucky enough to be a finalist every year since the inaugural TravMedia Awards back in 2020, as well as in the TravMedia sit-UP Awards that preceded them. This year is no exception as I’m delighted to announce that A Luxury Travel Blog has been shortlisted as a finalist in the Influencer of the Year category. The Travmedia Awards ceremony will now be held on Tuesday 5 April at The Londoner, Leicester Square. Fingers crossed! Content Secondly, those of you that read the blog regularly may have noticed a few changes. During lockdown, we started work on a series of new, SEO-optimised travel guides with a view to improving the site’s overall visibility. This has worked well with a number of guides already ranking highly in search results. But it’s a big project and we still have a long way to go before we attain a comprehensive global coverage for all the destinations that we want to feature. If your destination isn’t yet covered, or you’d like to get invovled, please contact us. You may also have noticed that the amount of regular blog content that we’re publishing is “on the up” with January 2022 looking like it will, in terms of blog posts published, be the busiest month for A Luxury Travel Blog since January 2014! This has been helped in part by a number of new guest bloggers joining the site recently, reviving one or two regular posts that we used to run on the site, and the state of the industry being such that we can carry out more reviews. Technical changes One other thing that happened during lockdown was that we moved to a new hosting company. This wasn’t really planned but unfortunately the small hosting company we were with just decided to ‘call it a day’. They were also our point of contact for any technical requirements so, in addition to finding a new host, we also needed to find someone new to overseee some technical aspects of the blog. We’ve done this now and are slowly working on revising a number of features on the site. For example, the relevancy of the ‘related posts’ that you see on each blog was never quite where I wanted it to be. If we had a blog post about the English Lake Disrict, and looked at the related content, we would get posts about Plitvice Lakes National Park (another ‘Lake District’ I suppose) or posts that were seemingly not related at all, when in fact we have lots of other posts about the English Lake District. I’m pleased to report that this has now been sorted and is working far more effectively and doing a better job at delivery useful and relevant related content. We will continue to work on other similar issues so that A Luxury Travel Blog providers readers with a better overall experience. Behind the scenes We’ve been working on a few areas to make it easier for luxury travel businesses to collaborate with us. Our on-site contact form is always a good starting point for this purpose – as is the industry channel of our mailing list – but we have also developed a number of Google Forms to better facilitate certain kinds of collaborations. For anyone interested in having a professional travel writer and representative of A Luxury Travel Blog carry out first-hand reviews for destinations, DMOs, airlines, luxury hotels, resorts, vacation rentals and other accommodation providers, cruises, yachts, restaurants, attractions, tours, etc., please submit a request using this Google Form. For retailers who would like to see physical products featured on A Luxury Travel Blog (think apparel/clothing, cosmetics, fashion accessories, food and drink, gadgets and tech, luggage, photography, sports gear, sunglasses, swimwear, travel accessories, watches, etc.), they can request coverage via this Google Form. The future After a bleak couple of years for the travel industry as a whole, we are very excited for what lies ahead for A Luxury Travel Blog. I believe travel is going to bounce back very strongly, particularly for the luxury sector – once it’s safely able to do so – and hopefully it isn’t going to be so long before we return to an industry that more closely resembles pre-pandemic levels than it does currently. The travel industry has proved its resilience many times before and this will be no exception. Meanwhile, we shall continue to produce content that we hope is useful and provides you with plenty of future inspiration for the many travel experiences and adventures that lie ahead.

Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson is Editor of A Luxury Travel Blog and has worked in the travel industry for more than 30 years. He is Winner of the Innovations in Travel ‘Best Travel Influencer’ Award from WIRED magazine. In addition to other awards, the blog has also been voted “one of the world’s best travel blogs” and “best for luxury” by The Daily Telegraph.

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14 Comments

  1. The Christmas gift guides were really helpful. The “him” Uk guide got me out of a big hole with my partner!

    Don’t forget that people have birthdays throughout the year so maybe a spring and autumn gift guide would be good top ups to the Christmas gift guides.

    I’ve kept a couple of ideas up my sleeve for his birthday from the Christmas suggestions. Though some more ideas in another round-up would be much appreciated.

    1. Thanks, Kirsty.. we have plans for more gift guides and product round-ups, so please watch this space. I’m glad the Christmas one was useful for you!

  2. As I’m hopefully in Lisbon at the end of next week, I thought that I’d check out your Portugal Guides but I saw that you haven’t got any yet. Look forward, one day, to scrolling through a Lisbon guide and comparing notes with how I found the city.

    1. Thanks, Stephen… we will have those (guides for both Portugal and Lisbon) before long. Of course, if you’d like to contribute, then by all means get in touch!

  3. Good luck with the TravMedia awards. From what I’ve seen of blogs you have a lot more voices. I used to follow some travel bloggers until I got fed up with their voice. Wherever they went it always sounded the same.

    A Luxury Travel Blog seems to cover a lot of the world. There’s the things that are affordable like that New Forest hotel and then the once in a lifetime trip like private yacht hire in the Bahamas or wherever. I like the variety.

    1. Thanks, Zoe… yes, we are a bit different from may of the travel blogs out there. Being the one of the first – and the first to focus specifically on luxury travel – there wasn’t really anything out there at the time that said “this is what a travel blog should look like”. As blogging slowly evolved, it seems to be the case that most travel blogs are individual accounts from the people behind the blog. A Luxury Travel Blog is different in that it’s a multi-author platform with contributions from lots of different people. Some will see that as a good thing, whereas I’m sure others will come here and perhaps feel they don’t really get to know about the blogger as much as they would like. It’s all horses for courses, I suppose, but we’ve always kept to this model and feel it works well for us and ensures that we’re always producing a wide variety of content for our readers to enjoy.

    2. I’ve got the same feeling about A Luxury Travel Blog as Zoe. It’s not just one person going on about what a fabulous time in X, Y or Z. It’s a whole world-wide collection of travel professionals sharing their insights. That’s what makes the blog so unique. So that’s why I like the model and the way you do it.

  4. I bet all of these competitions are pulling in the readers? And once they’re on the site they probably start reading all the posts and find somewhere else they want to go as well.

    1. That’s the idea, Jez… everyone loves the idea of winning a vacation, I think. But if nothing else, it’s helping build awareness on a number of different luxury travel options.

  5. Another strength of A Luxury Travel Blog is that it’s better written than some of the other luxury travel blogs. Though I sometimes find some grammar errors which can be a little distracting.

    Some of the other blogs can be colloquial and informal. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as the writing is fresh and informative. The problem is that usually the colloquialisms are used because of deficiencies in language.

    1. Thanks, Lorraine – I’m glad you like the articles and the attention to detail that’s paid to our content. Since there’s a number of different people contributing, it’s not always easy to maintain a single particular style, but we do always try to keep things well-written and error-free where we can! If you ever notice a typo, feel free to let me know and I@ll be sure to correct it. Thanks!

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