Not aimed at any particular person or website, just some thoughts about trends that annoy me. (Yes today is a rather slow day)

• Have an actual opinion. Many blogs are trying harder than the local tourism board to promote how flawlessly perfect each destination is. It feels like a bland SEO race to the bottom where everything is described as a unique and popular destination.

• Make it obvious what you did. I would be hard pressed to tell if some bloggers actually even went to the same continent as the destination in the post, or if they just combined 10 minutes of TripAdvisor and Wikipedia with some stock photos.

• On which note I would rather see a wonky photo taken on a potato in poor light conditions than yet another stock photo. Sometimes a stock photo can nicely illustrate conditions or a view that you just couldn’t get (or missed the chance of) yourself, but when every last photo is a stock photo then it feels fake. Bonus points if the stock photo is clearly the wrong place which has a similar name.

• If there are things that you didn’t do but think might be good then by all means mention them as ideas – but don’t confidently talk about how amazing they are. Don’t talk about somewhere being a cycling paradise with 152 bike routes (or whatever Komoot or the first result in Google says) none of which you rode and then back it up with a stock photo of somewhere else entirely.

• Don’t get a bot to write it. If you didn’t experience it (or at least research it) yourself then you are not adding any value by just trying to pad your blog out. Best case it will just be bland, worst case you won’t know when it makes an obvious mistake and you are going to end up looking like an amateur.

• If you collaborate with others make sure they actually know what they are talking about. I have seen guest posts from bloggers who barely knew the place they were covering and didn’t actually bother to check basic facts or even their spelling. One blogger has been the guest expert for a certain city numerous times, despite the fact they seemingly went there once, make many mistakes in each article, and don’t have anything to say beyond the very obvious.

• Don’t make purely affiliate link posts. If you make a post about how you spent 1 night in Munich, then your top 10 places to stay in Munich is clearly meaningless booking.com affiliate linkage. Likewise when your top 10 day trips from Munich all happen to be GetYourGuide links with generic descriptions (and half of them are the same trip but with the sights in a different order) then it isn’t going to do much to convince me to put any trust in you.

• Go easy on the adverts. I don’t mind a few, but when there is an advert between every paragraph/image then I am not sticking around to see what you have to say regardless of how good it is (especially if more are popping out of the header/footer and sidebar too).

• Be transparent on any sponsorships. What does ‘Made in collaboration with X tourism’ mean?

• Remember that everyone can see your ‘work with me’ page. You can make all the effort in the world to appear authentic and genuine, but then having a ‘work with me’ page that lists the numerous things you will do for money and cites your followers like a farmer counting livestock then it doesn't convince me too much as a reader.