By Nicholas Montemaggi, Chief Marketing Officer at iambassador
Up to now travel blogs were, in addition to being a source of inspiration for readers to decide where to undertake the next trip, especially useful to travellers when they looked for information on things to do, see and try even when they were already in the destination. It is due to the spread of smartphones, reduction of roaming within the European Union besides a considerable increase of public and private Wi-Fi networks. Therefore, the pandemic of COVID-19 has not changed public’s approach so much, but has reduced it at the moment since there is no longer the possibility to travel, and many of the contents are no longer read and searched online. However, checking the statistics of the most important international travel blogs, we have noticed that after an initial stop, people are again researching travel content and travel stories on blogs, although now it is about travelling in the middle of nature and alone, with a focus on how close you are to your home rather than information of the other side of the world, which it can be translated to: we want to go out and breathe and travel again.
Will travel blogger continue be there?
Data from iambassador’s travel blogger network (where over 500 travel blogs from all over the world are connected) indicates that in the months of March and April there were drops of about 60-70% of readers, presumably related to people being unable to travel. However, many bloggers have seen the number of readers shift to articles that contain not only travel content, but other content as well. For instance, it has been recorded an important growth in articles containing not only travel information but video recipes.
It is not easy to predict which is going to be the future role of bloggers, especially when we still do not know what the world will be like in the post-pandemic. Surely, travel will recover very slowly, in small steps: first, the proximity trips to your cities, your regions and then to your country. Then, travel between neighbouring countries will follow, with long-haul travel last. As for the role of bloggers I would like to use the words of an important travel blogger, Margherita Ragg, from the blog www.thecrowdedplanet.com : “As a blogger we can certainly become ambassadors for our cities and our regions, showing on our social network channels and on our blogs lesser-known places in our area, and then consequently start talking again about the more distant places once the restrictions are eliminated “.
A reborn travelling mood
In general, we will surely see the end of the lockdown followed by cities full of tourists as we have known so far. Holidays in B&Bs, campsites and villas surrounded by nature as well as travel by bike or on foot along the historical paths will increase, discovering remote villages and places by simply putting social distancing. The way of staying overnight will certainly also change, we will no longer have holidays with overnight stays in different structures every two or three days, but more overnight stays in the same structure for the duration of the trip.
Quoting again Margherita Ragg: “As a blogger we must surely shift our focus from promoting well-known and famous destinations to places that do not live much of tourism. For example, a village in Molise compared to Rome, or an island like Stampalia (Astypalea) in Greece compared to the more famous and popular Mykonos“. What’s more, online travel experiences will become increasingly popular for some time, such as dance lessons, yoga or cooking classes that can be done online, while giving operators the opportunity to earn a little something and travellers to run away with your mind for a while without leaving your home.