Travel Tales
While the memories of a trip are still fresh in your mind, it's important to jot down as many highlights as you can think of. A lot of leisure and business travelers keep a trip journal for that very purpose and use their notes to create informative reports for school, for work or for publication in a newspaper, magazine or guidebook. The insider tips and cultural advice imparted in a travel report can then help fellow travelers make smart decisions and get the most for their money and time.
Instructions
1. Identify the target readership of your travel report and what topics will be the most interesting and relevant to the readers. If, for instance, you're writing a travel report for a school assignment, your instructor and classmates will want to hear anecdotes and observations about what you personally experienced. An essay for a travel publication will focus on elements such as reservations, directions and costs so that readers will know what to expect. A travel report that's related to your work makes the trip more of a fact-finding mission to articulate cultural mores, global interfacing and/or exploring the potential for holding future conferences or establishing new offices.
2. Start with a working outline and include categories for transportation, accommodations, meals, geography, history, climate, local customs, sightseeing attractions/excursions and "off the beaten path" recommendations. If the report is being prepared in the context of business, you'll want to include an additional section for meetings, interviews and presentations and which are relevant to the objective of the trip.
3. Write down as much as you can remember for each category. Keeping receipts, maps, postcards and brochures will help to jog your memory. If you're referencing restaurants in your report, many of them have websites from which you can extract information about their hours of operation and copies of menus. In addition, hotel websites often list nearby attractions for visitors.
4. Create an overview of your travel report, which will be the introduction to your material. The overview not only sets the tone of the report but provides readers with a few preview tidbits that will make them excited to read it. In magazines, this is the "hook" that grabs a reader's attention and usually takes the form of an anecdote, a question or a little known fact about the location.
5. Supplement your travel report with references to books, documentaries and websites where readers can learn additional information.
Tags: travel report, your travel, your travel report
