Open three travel blogs at random and you can play a game: cover the photographs, read only the first paragraph, and try to guess which country you are in. Most of the time you cannot. The plane lands, the air smells of spice and possibility, the author feels a sense of wonder, and somewhere a sunset is described as breathtaking. It is not that these writers lack material. It is that the material has been sanded down by habits we all fall into, and the habits are so comfortable that we do not notice them in our own drafts.
The good news is that these are fixable at the sentence level. Below are the seven most common, each with a diagnosis and something concrete to do about it. Read them as a checklist against your last trip write-up. Chances are two or three will sting.
“We landed in Lisbon just after dawn, exhausted but excited.” It is honest, and it is one of the least interesting sentences in travel writing, because every trip begins with a journey and every journey reads the same. The arrival is your research, not your story.
The fix: Start where the place first pushes back. Not the airport, but the moment the ticket machine swallowed your coins and refused to give them back; the first time you misread a menu and were served something you would never have ordered. A scene that could only happen in this place, at this hour, to this narrator. Then fold the logistics in later, in half a sentence: “Two days after the night bus, I still had sand in my shoes.”
Breathtaking. Stunning. Quaint. Unforgettable. Words like these are not descriptions; they are instructions to the reader to feel something on your behalf. They also appear almost everywhere, which means they carry almost no weight.
The fix: For every grand adjective, ask what you actually saw that made you reach for it, then write that instead. A market is not “vibrant” — it has a woman selling parsley in bunches tied with blue plastic twine, and a radio playing behind a stack of melons. An old town is not “charming” — its doorways are built for people four inches shorter than you. Keep one strong adjective per paragraph, and make sure it is one a photograph could not do without.
Day one, day two, day three. The chronological report is easy to write and exhausting to read, because chronology is not the same as shape. A story needs a question, a complication, a turn — and most itineraries have none.
The fix: Pick one scene and build around it. The whole trip can appear in a sentence or two at the edges. Before you draft, write down the single moment that would make the best scene — the argument with the taxi driver, the wrong turn at dusk, the meal that went badly and then brilliantly — and structure the piece so everything else exists to support it. If you notice yourself writing “the next morning,” stop and check whether you need that morning at all.
“I felt a profound sense of connection to the landscape.” Readers cannot feel what the narrator announces; they feel what they are shown. Emotion in travel writing is a by-product of specific, physical detail, and it collapses when you name it directly.
The fix: Cut the sentence that tells us how you felt and replace it with the two or three sensory facts that caused it. Not “I was overwhelmed by the cathedral,” but: cold stone through a thin jacket, the smell of candle wax, a woman in the third row crying quietly and not hiding it. Trust the reader. This is the hardest of the seven habits to break, because the emotional sentence feels like the point. It rarely is.
Many trip write-ups read as though the author moved through a film set abandoned for their benefit. Vistas, meals, rooms, sunsets — and no one else speaks, argues, sells, waits or complains. This is not just lonely; it flattens the place into scenery.
The fix: Give at least three people a concrete action. You do not need interviews. A barista who wipes the counter in the same spot over and over; a child on a bicycle who follows you for two blocks; the man at the next table who orders the same thing as you and then sends it back. Small, observed behaviour does the work that a page of cultural commentary cannot.
Halfway down the piece, the voice changes from “I” to “it.” The city has a population of, was founded in, is known for, and offers visitors the opportunity to. This is research rehoused on the page without being digested, and it stalls the story dead.
The fix: Use facts the way a chef uses salt: in the right place and sparingly. One good fact, dropped where it changes what the reader sees, is worth ten in a block. If a piece of context cannot be attached to a scene you have already written, it belongs in your notes, not the article. Try cutting every third factual sentence and read it again — most pieces get better.
“I arrived in search of myself, and left with so much more than I could have imagined.” The forced epiphany. It tells the reader that the difference between you and them is a plane ticket, and it closes the piece with a platitude instead of an image.
The fix: End on something concrete that carries the meaning without stating it. An object: the shell you are still carrying home in a coat pocket. A gesture: the last thing you did before the door closed. A line of overheard speech. If you must reflect, keep it to one short sentence and place it before the final image rather than after it. Let the reader close the door.
A useful test: cover the place names in your draft. If the piece could be about anywhere, the detail is doing too little work.
Before you publish, run this over the draft in order. It takes less time than you think.
None of this requires a more interesting trip. It requires a more patient look at the one you took — and the willingness to throw away the arrival, the sunset, and the lesson you were planning to end on.
Photo: 6689062 / Pixabay
