For Travel Writers: Seven Lessons from the Road

I’d do it differently if I had the chance to do it again.

I’m sure you’ve said that before, and certainly, it’s not the last time I’ll say it. But frequency makes it no less true. I made more than a handful of rookie mistakes, though the trip, planned with a mere four weeks notice, was still quite the rabbit out of the hat. Oh, enough obfuscating metaphors (here at NEV, we do love big words!), let’s cut to the chase. Here’s what I f-ed up and how I’d do it differently.

1. More planning time.

I was a pinch hitter for the Hawaii guide. There’s always a pinch hitter, and hey, you have to say yes to things if you want to get anywhere, so that’s okay, but check it out: Hawaii tourism asks for six months lead time when you go to them to plan a press trip. Six months! I wish! Had I known that, I’d have asked for at least another month’s extension to my deadline. It was possible to pull the trip together, but the pressure of time meant that I was saying yes to things just to fill my calendar, not because they were necessarily the best choice.

2. Treat transit time as dead time.

I scribbled up a tentative itinerary based on what I thought we could squeeze into a reasonable amount of time, but I didn’t really have a grasp of the big picture. I feel like I short changed myself on Maui because I didn’t realize that the travel between islands would take so much time. I figured I’d have half days here and there to do stuff, but if, like me, you spent all afternoon a sickly shade of green from the channel crossing, there’s no way you’re keen on nightlife that evening. Nope. But it’s not just that. You have to pack up, make sure you have everything, check out, get your rental returned, get to the next place, get oriented, find your hotel… this is true for all travelers, not just the writer in research mode, but for the writer in research mode it means work hours lost. That was a real drag.

3. Print it.

On day three, when our laptop died, I thought I could get through on my limited calendar, but it just wasn’t enough. I missed a scheduled date – I feel really bad about that – because I’d abbreviated the company name on my notes. J, bless him, on the day the machine died, said we should go to the mall and Just Buy a New One, but I didn’t want to do that because we’d be settling for what was available, not what we’d buy by choice, but it might have been the better decision because we still ended up wasting time and money on ridiculously overpriced internet while I searched my archived Gmail to find important information. If I’d printed everything up, I’d have been in much better shape. It also would have saved us the stone faced annoyance of airline employees who when asking me which flight we were on, were not amused when I said I did not know.

4. Tell them to mail the press kit.

When we checked in for our final inter-island flight, we were nearly 10 pounds over in excess baggage. That was all propaganda from providers and tourist information, can you believe it? We schlepped that stuff everywhere and it was heavy. Really heavy. Better they post it to your home office and you review it later. Honestly, a lot of it gets thrown out later, anyway.

5. Ask more people for their pictures.

I have the great fortune to be the sort of person that people seem to want to tell stories too. On our last day in Kona, we walked into a shop where the proprietor, an extremely healthy barefoot guy in his late 70s, saw my Lana’i backpack and started reminiscing about his childhood on that island where he picked pineapple, where his mother is buried, where everyone had a “bongo number” that they used to pay for their goods in the company store… And a few days before, at Scotty’s Music on Kauai, the Hawaiian owner started telling stories of how he’d traveled the world to surf, from Alaska to Tahiti, and I don’t have pictures of either of those guys. I’m really sorry about that. I don’t know that they’d be appropriate for the guide, but I do wish I had them for myself.

6. Visit the tourist office and meet your contacts.

When I did hook up with the folks I was supposed to meet, it was hugely valuable, even if they were the PR reps for something they were trying to push. Why? Because they’re locals. They can tell you where the nightlife is or where the good food is or which beach is really the best… they really do try to answer your questions about, well, anything going on in their backyard. I’m not exactly wracked with regret over the dates I missed, but I am sorry and I know that I would be all the more informed for having met more people. Related to that, if there’s time, have questions ready as openers, just to get going, even if you think you might know the answers. Local insight trumps everything, every time.

7. Plan some vacation time.

I know this sounds really dumb from someone who’s just back from Hawaii, but I’m whupped. If you’ve done this kind of work before, you know what I mean and if you haven’t, you’re totally unsympathetic. That’s fine, I get it, but I can also tell you that in three and a half weeks, we had one day that was a vacation day. One day off in three and a half weeks. We were up and at it every morning by nine at the absolute latest, did a full ten-twelve hour day of rushing about, and sometimes, headed out again in the evenings. It was exhausting, absolutely exhausting. A person needs a day off every now and then, and not getting a day off when you are in a tropical paradise is freaky frustrating.

And in case you think I have NO perspective, here I am, um, a-hem, hard at work.

Related: For Travel Writers: Seven Successes from the Road