The posts I will be popping up on my poor neglected travel blog over the next few days have been a long time coming. Some I drafted back in Beirut in November, others I scribbled almost a month ago while I was recovering from bronchial pneumonia from a hotel room in Bangkok where we were working on a guidebook. That diagnosis, by the way, based on nasty symptoms like coughing up blood, came from my doctor uncle in Australia by email because I was too busy working to get to a GP. It would be an understatement to say that 2009 has been a hectic year of travel and writing for Terry and I - something I only recently appreciated glancing at all the books we've written which have been published this year sitting on the shelf beside my desk here at my family's house in Bendigo, Australia: Footprint Italian Lakes, Thomas Cook Northern Italy, and Thomas Cook Travellers Calabria, plus a handful of books I updated for AA and Thomas Cook. Then there are others we've written that I haven't even seen (like the Rough Guides Clean Breaks, which I contributed to) or are not yet published, like the new edition to the Rough Guide to Australia (for which we updated four and a bit states - half the country! - on a four month-long road trip from October 2008 to February 2009), and another first edition, Back Roads Australia for DK. I skim down this page scanning my posts, and while there have been few compared to last year or the year before, when I stop at In Print and Online and then take a look at that archive I see why. We may continually read the claims that print is dead yet we've spent more time writing for magazines this year than any other, and up until we returned to guidebooks in December we'd spent six months solid doing little else but write for magazines. The irony is that we've now been hired by HomeAway Holiday-Rentals for a year to travel the world, stay in their properties, and blog about the experience - something I never could have predicted. So the travel blogging that for me had been an escape from my 'day job' as a travel writer now becomes our main source of income. Print is still not dead, however - as much as our new client appreciates social media, they are still going to pay us bonuses for every article we get published in a magazine or newspaper. So I'm expecting it's going to be another busy year, but I'm pleased to say that we'll be slowing down considerably. No longer will I be envying a donkey his pace. More on our new project, Grantourismo soon.

Pictured? Fortune tellers in Bangkok.

So how, as travel writers, do we get ourselves into the situation I described in the last post? And is it possible to be a travel writer and avoid this frenzied pace of life? To answer the second question first, I don't think it is possible if you want to make more than a decent living out of this profession. To answer the first, the way we work now is that we go on a trip with a number of commissions up our sleeves, and then while we're on the ground we follow up more leads for stories and pitch new ideas to editors from that destination. But that doesn't mean that other requests for stories stop coming in. As wonderful as they are, most of the time they're not even related to the destination we're in, which of course complicates things. While we're on the road, an editor might email and ask "Where are you at the moment?" which usually means he/she has a hotel they want reviewed or lead they'd like us to pursue. We'd be crazy to say no. At the same time, the longer we stay in a place and the more people we meet, the more story ideas we develop. Although we worked on a dozen stories in Damascus this trip, I left with twice as many ideas that I'd love to pursue next time. Do we prefer working this way, on multiple commissions, to focusing on a guidebook and a story or two? Absolutely. For one, it pays a hell of a lot more for less work. Secondly, we're meeting way more people doing stories than we did on books because we're no longer pounding the pavements all day every day putting dots on maps and checking transport timetables. But more on that another time. One of the downsides to this frantic pace is that it leaves little time for blogging. But blogging doesn't pay the bills. And for now, I kind of like it that way. I'll tell you why another time. Now, I have a story (or three) to write.

Well, we're off again. And yet it seems like we'd only just arrived. After five taxing days of sleeping and eating in Barcelona, and before that seven grueling weeks working on a book in Mallorca, the last 12 semi-sedentary days in the UAE have sped by. It's been busy. We had a few days of restaurant reviews, interviews and photo shoots, then time in catching up on loads of writing and planning our next trip from our friend's colossal Abu Dhabi villa, rightly dubbed 'Falcon's Crest'. Picture this: a monumental Arabian villa, sweeping staircase, 20+ rooms, five bathrooms, one of which is nicknamed Hef's (it's all black!), and a gold falcon over the driveway gate.

But, sadly it's all over already and today we're headed back to Dubai to our other 'home away from home', Al Manzil, so we don't miss our early flight to Damascus in the morning. We're trying Jazeera Airways for the first time, and over the next six weeks we'll be testing out a number of low-cost Gulf airlines as we bounce around the region a bit researching stories for in-flights and travel magazines: Syria 2 weeks, Qatar 9 days, Kuwait 5 days, Lebanon 5 days, Jordan 4 days, then back to the UAE again. That's a lot of countries in a short space of time for us with not a lot of time in each place - normally we like to take things a lot more slowly. But it's work, not play: we're doing some feature stories, profiles, and a bunch of hotel and restaurant reviews, as well as having meetings for a couple of book projects we're developing. No, not guidebooks! And for the first time in some years this will be the first trip where we're working on magazine stories only - no guidebooks, thankfully. The last few have really taken their toll... but who's going to listen to a travel writer complain, huh?

So what did we not enjoy about Mallorca? Well, Mallorca is not for everyone. Sure, that could be said about a lot of places, but there are some destinations that few people dislike: Paris, Italy, Thailand for instance. And perhaps it's just that - despite the stunning landscapes, fascinating people, beautiful hotels and fabulous restaurants - Mallorca is not for me. Would I go there again? To work, absolutely. I'd happily go back and talk to the island's talented chefs or write about its burgeoning wine industry. Off-season though. Would I go there on holidays? No, most probably not. And for us, that's one of the criteria we use to judge a destination. If it's the kind of place where I think "I'd prefer to be lying on that beach than writing about it" or a place I make a mental note to return to one day, then I place it fairly high on my list of great destinations. But it's more complex than that. There are other things I disliked about Mallorca. Mainly, that Mallorca did not feel like Spain. Nor did it feel Catalan. Juxtaposed with Barcelona, where we spent five days after Mallorca, that was even more apparent. Barcelona is a cosmopolitan, multicultural city, immensely popular with tourists, with a reasonable-sized expat population - yet it's still retained its unique Catalan identity and essential Spanish-ness. Mallorca, sadly, has lost a lot of the characteristics that make it Mallorcan. They are still there, of course - the language, cuisine, arts and crafts, traditional customs, etc - they're just very hard to find. We located them of course - because that's what travel writers do - but I continually wondered how tourists there for a week fared. Mallorca is a place where you most definitely need to use a quality guidebook, follow some good local blogs, have a local guide, or quickly make local friends, if you want to experience the 'real' Mallorca - or as the Mallorquins like to say, 'the other Mallorca'. Unfortunately, for most tourists visiting the island, the closest they'll get to Mallorcan culture are artificial experiences (as fun as they can be) like La Granja, pictured.

As you'd know if you follow me on Twitter, Calabrian-based blogger Michelle Fabio over at Bleeding Espresso has been running an interview with me this week about writing our Calabria guidebook, travel writing, travelling, the writing process, and our lives as travel writers. She's also running a contest to give away 5 copies of our Traveller's Calabria book. All you have to do is post a comment on her blog at the end of the Q&A and at the end of the week (tomorrow), she'll pick the 5 winners and give them a book each. So, what are you waiting for? Get over there! Here's part 1 of the Q&A, part 2, part 3, and part 4, and you can read part 5 tomorrow - last day, so don't miss out!

Pictured? The beach at Scilla - in Calabria of course.

I almost forgot to tell you... as my regular Cool Travel Guide readers know, we spent a lot of time in Italy last year researching and photographing first editions of new travel guidebooks, starting with a month in Calabria, then a month in Milan, followed by more than a month in the Italian Lakes region and Northern Italy. Our Calabria book written for the Thomas Cook Travellers series hit the shelves in late April (see this post), and our Northern Italy book for the same series will be released in a couple of weeks (you can buy it here). While we're proud of all of our Italian books - Terry shot beautiful photos for them and we put a lot of work into researching and writing them, a book that we're especially proud of (it took even more blood, sweat and tears during particularly challenging circumstances), is our book released last month on the Italian Lakes, including Milan and Po Valley Towns, which we wrote for Footprint's new Italia series. Do have a flick through them when you're next in a bookshop. And don't hesitate to let me know if you ever need tips on travel in Italy.

That was the salutation I saw on at least a dozen emails from hotels and PRs on the Balearic island of Mallorca, Spain (also known as Majorca) while I was organizing our current trip, one in which my husband/co-author Terry is shooting thousands of images for several guidebooks and I'm updating one guidebook. Yet during the first couple of days here the skies were grey and cloudy, ruining the possibility of Terry getting good shots in the south and east coast, while yesterday the south-west coast, the last leg of our road trip, was hazy from the high humidity. The days in between were just gorgeous though, although sweltering hot, reminding us of Dubai. We've now finished the main road trip, although we'll have a few more days of pick-ups to do, and are in Palma in an apartment we're renting for a couple of weeks. As I'm busy writing now, there's no time for blogging today - which is frustrating because there's so much I want to share with you, including our stopover in Singapore, our latest news from Dubai, the Venice Biennale, and of course I have so much to tell you about Mallorca. But for now, I'm just going to have to share this vista of sunny Mallorca.

Does the world really need travel guides compiled for us from Wikipedia and/or any other online sources for that matter? Following on from my posts on Offbeat Guides part 1: my findings & part 2: my conclusion, I've been thinking about the future of travel guides... but first, the postscript: after posting part 2, I returned to Offbeat Guides for another glance at the Dubai guide to look for some author details. At the end of the Contents, I noticed a References page. I'd initially thought this might have been a further reading list. It wasn't. It turns out the Dubai guide's content came largely from Wikipedia. A few questions immediately sprang to mind:
1) Why on earth would a site marketing itself as a new travel product with its own brand 'Offbeat Guides' rely on using Wikipedia (predominantly) for its content?
2) Why wouldn't they incorporate Wikipedia into their branding? Or announce on the home page where their content is mainly coming from? (Had I have realised that from the start I wouldn't have wasted time testing their beta.)
3) How can they claim they have the most current content on the web when they're so heavily relying on Wikipedia? Not everything on Wikipedia is updated regularly. Content is only as good as the author who has written it. Or the editor editing it! And if we don't know either how can we trust it? Which leads me to my final question...
4) Why did the team behind Offbeat Guides think travellers even needed such a product?

The shelves of most good bookshops are crammed with row after row of quality travel guides written by professional authors, edited by professional editors, and produced by established guidebook publishers (DK, Rough Guides, Footprint, Fodors, Time Out, etc), and then tucked into a little corner here and there will be books in smaller numbers but sometimes produced to even greater standards, like the gorgeous Thames and Hudson Style City guides and the sexy Hip Hotels books, there'll also be a few niche guides like Hedonist's and Pulse's Night+Day series, and there might be a rack of cool guides like Wallpaper's, or a box of Luxe guides on the counter. And we haven't even started on online guides such as Triporati's travel guides and World Travel Guides, and all those excellent resident-authored city blogs that are as good as, if not better than, some published city guides... so why, when there are so many brilliant, high quality, authored guides, do we need something like this? Please don't tell me this is a sign of things to come. If anything, I was hoping that the future of travel guides would lie in more lovingly-crafted almost artisanal guides by small passionate publishers such as Love guides. Please don't tell me I'm wrong. What do you think?

Outdated, incorrect, misleading, poorly-written and poor choice of points of interest, the Dubai 'guide' that Offbeat Guides delivered was disappointing. It was about as current, authentic and original as the museum display pictured. My conclusions based on my findings:
1) Not an 'offbeat' bone in the guide's body: the title suggests the content's focus would be quirky and alternative in its selections. It wasn't. All mainstream.
2) Little that's customised or personalised: site promised I'd "build my own personalized travel guide". Apart from being able to input content I'd written, I couldn't pull info from other (more reliable) sources or a community, unlike other guides. Strange, because Offbeat Guides blog says they're fans of customized product companies (Lulu, Cafepress, Spreadshirt etc) which allow publishing or production of original creative content and/or community-created designs. Structure is customisable; can choose which sections you don't want.
3) Content is not original: content that appeared in the Dubai guide is already available at thousands of sites on web. Easy to check: I googled a few phrases & paras. As content appears in so many different places (legitimately, syndicated, plagiarised & as spam) it's difficult to identify original authors. This is a huge problem: how can content be trusted? What's most astounding is they expect you to pay for anonymous content. Offbeat Guides appears to be little more than a packager and retailer of readily-available (and sometimes suspect) travel information.
4) Information was out-of-date, false & inaccurate (as you saw in my findings): this was my biggest problem with the guide I tested, not only because their Twitter Bio proclaims "Most up-to-date travel guides. Ever!" but for content to have value it should to be true, accurate and up-to-date - especially if you're selling it!

The guides seem to be purely a money-making exercise. There's none of the attention to detail, originality, passion and commitment to producing quality travel content that we've seen in products such as Love travel guides. If anything, this is a strong case for traditional guidebook production (print or online), i.e. guides written by authors who can write well, are destination experts, have visited all the places, and checked all the information. If the guides were free, then I wouldn't care, but that they have the nerve to charge unsuspecting travellers is what irks me. I'd love to know what you think.

As the new travel product Offbeat Guides intrigued me and I'd been invited to try their beta, I decided to test them out with Dubai, a place few people know better than Terry and I. My shorthand notes based on the exercise:
* After signing in, selecting destination & inputting travel details, site promises I'll "build my own personalized travel guide". Seconds later my 'guide' appears:
* Intro - very general, not written by someone who knows city well OR visited in recent years; misleading ("It is essentially a desert city"), out-dated ("A relatively new tourist destination, Dubai has gained in popularity in recent years."; probably written 6 years ago); & spookily familiar: "It is a city of superlatives: for the fastest, biggest, tallest, largest and highest, Dubai is the destination." Googled that phrase & discovered thousands of sites with exact same content! Probably one of our old Lonely Planet Dubai books there somewhere too!
* False travel planning advice, eg. "While Israeli passport holders are not welcome, having Israeli stamps in your passport is not a problem." Not true! Officially it is a problem. This could get travellers turned away at airport.
* Lots of incorrect info & evidence author hasn't visited places. Examples:
"Express By Holiday Inn Dubai-Internet City... this modern hotel is downright luxurious for a Holiday Inn Express..." Confirms author hadn't been here. We've stayed here. It's comfy for budget hotel, doesn't come close to luxury.
"The Terrace Bar, Park Hyatt... a chilled out bar touching the Dubai Creek... Plays light music." No idea what 'light music' is. Obvious author hadn't been when DJ's spin weekend afternoons.
"Cafe Chic... ran by Michelin star chef Michel Rostang." Mon Dieu! It's been many years since Monsieur Rostang was around... last time we ate here Chef Pierrick Cizeron was still at helm (has been for years) & Michelin 2-starred chef-patron Philippe Gauvreau was still overseeing Cafe & visiting frequently from Lyon.
"Basta Art Cafe... sandwiches-and-salads menu is aimed squarely at tourists." Not true! Basta was very much locals-only cafe til few years ago, until writers like us & Time Out mag team encouraged tourists to go here. Customers still mainly locals/expats. Menu hasn't lost focus - we eat sandwiches & salads in Dubai too. Um, shwarma (see below) is actually an Arabic 'sandwich'.
"Shawarma is the most available (and cheap!) food in Dubai. It is meat that has been cooked on a skewer and then cut into thin strips and placed into a pita bread with vegetables and dressing." Um, no it isn't.
"Ravi Restaurant... excellent Pakistani food that is incredibly cheap. This is a must see for anyone with a spicy tooth." It's cheap, it's Pakistani, it's not pretty to look at, it's far from excellent. It's just cheap grub for those looking for a bargain meal. Nothing more. Spicy tooth, hey?
I could go on but I won't. I skimmed the rest, but generally: writing was weak & badly structured, choices were usual suspects, and it was clear writer hadn't been to most places.
While the site enabled me to incorporate my own notes, why would I want to add them to the trash that was on the page? And why I would want to pay to then have this printed (and bound?) was unclear...

Hotel gurus Mr and Mrs Smith recently shared their secrets as to How Smith finds hotels on their engaging blog. Mrs Smith is a Cool Travel Guide reader and after she recently commented on my post Don't judge a guidebook by its cover: judge it by its author, I asked her how she selects hotels. Mr and Mrs Smith use a combination of sources: their staff, members, hoteliers, press releases, the media, Smith spies, and hotel books. Travel writers draw on a similar set of resources, dividing We our hotel research into pre-trip and on-the-road research:
* PRE-TRIP RESEARCH
1) Travel guidebooks & websites - if we're updating a guidebook, we'll start by looking at the hotels in the book, to see what's in there and what's missing. Then we skim through other guides on the destination. Because publishers like Lonely Planet, DK, Fodors and Frommers have put so much content online, we don't even need to visit a bookshop. What are we looking for? Overlap first of all. If a hotel appears in every guidebook then it had better be special or it had better be the only one in town. If it doesn't appear anywhere else, then we need to find out why. We make notes on these things which we'll investigate later in person.
2) The Internet - we'll look at the websites of hotels on our list and make notes as to which look suitable, suspect, or so fabulous we have to investigate further. We'll check hotel booking sites like Design Hotels, i-escape, Tablet, Hip Hotels, Holiday Pad , Small Luxury Hotels of the World, Leading Hotels of the World, and of course, Mr and Mrs Smith, to see if there are any new hotels that could be worth considering. We'll also do some random Googling. Occasionally we'll check Trip Advisor; there, we're not looking for new properties (as we're more interested in reviews by professional travel critics, people who spend more nights in hotels than they do at home) but rather to confirm any suspicions we might have about a place.
3) Hotel GMs & PRs - because we've stayed at, inspected, reviewed, and photographed tens of thousands of hotels around the globe, we have a lot of friends who manage and work at hotels, so we hear about new hotel openings over conversation, whether it's by email or at dinner, drinks or parties.
4) PRs & press releases - ditto; we have contacts who work on staff at hotels as Public Relations, Media Relations or MarkComm managers, or for PR agencies representing hotels, so we're on a lot of mailing lists and feeds. Dozens of emails arrive in our In Box every day about hotel openings (including invitations to launches!) See Terry's photos of the behind-the-scenes preparations and glam opening of the InterContinental Dubai Festival City earlier this year here.)
5) Travel media - we read every travel magazine and newspaper travel section there is, as many in-flight and hotel mags we can get our hands on, and frequently scour their websites. We subscribe to all the industry and trade feeds and online newsletters. I don't tend to look at travel websites or blogs like Hotel Chatter for new hotels, because generally they've received the same press releases I have, and I'd rather read the information straight from the source than someone else's interpretation. While I occasionally rip items out of travel magazines, due to their long lead times we tend to know about the hotel, and have probably already stayed there, by the time the issue hits the newsstands but their still handy for some we may have missed.
* ON-THE-ROAD RESEARCH
6) Hotel experiences - once we're on the road in a destination, we'll be testing out hotels by staying, eating and drinking at them (both undercover and through arrangement), and by doing hotel inspections. We'll also hear about new hotels this way. While the hotel PR is showing us a suite, she'll probably say "Oh, have you seen the suites at the new xxx hotel? I hear they're lovely but not as spacious as ours."
7) Leg-work - once we arrive at a destination, we'll have a lot of places to check out and try, restaurants, cafes, bars, clubs, shops, museums, galleries, and other attractions, and during encounters with people at these places, we'll inevitably hear about hotel openings.
8) Accidental discoveries - as we pound the pavements of a city all day every day, there'll always be one or two hotels we stumble upon that we haven't read heard about and nobody has mentioned. They may have just opened or may still be under construction, or maybe it's a hidden gem that's been continually over-looked or recently renovated. Either way, we'll be in there checking it out.

So, how do you hear about hotels? And have you ever discovered secret gems that weren't in any guidebooks or websites that nobody seemed to know about? Pictured: our studio apartment at the sublime Aleenta Phuket, which we experienced last October while we were in Thailand for DK.

By Lara & Terry*
If you've just joined us, this continues from the previous post so read this first.
So, why would these three places now get glowing reviews in an updated guidebook? What do they have in common? The answer: all of these places do excellent public relations. And when you read the reviews it’s quite easy to tell that the writer hasn't set foot in any of the places, or if the person did, they were blindfolded. A quick search on Google revealed that many of the reviews of the restaurant we left out of our edition use the same language to describe the chef, the preparation of the food, and the cuisine itself. It’s not a coincidence. It’s simply a recycled press release. And to the writer in a hurry on a tight budget, the 'general consensus' is enough to tick it off for inclusion and write the review from the establishment’s website, a press release, or other lustrous reviews.

In this particular city, we had tried all the restaurants we put in the first edition of that book, as we’d been regular visitors to the city for years. And on subsequent visits we used our local industry contacts (hotel staff, chefs and so on) to identify new places to try. But what we found most interesting from our guidebook test were the other reviewers’ responses to the restaurants we didn’t think were very good. When we discussed this with our informed local contacts in the restaurant or hotel business they almost unanimously said: “I can never understand why foreign writers think that place is so good!” One famous chef we recently interviewed knows exactly what we’re talking about. He told us that one dish that was on his menu for only a couple of months a few years ago keeps appearing in 'reviews' of his restaurant in travel guidebooks and articles. He blames one high-profile magazine article (which has since appeared on the internet) for this and is bemused by diners coming in and asking for the dish! The mention of this dish is his benchmark for judging whether the writer has even looked at his menu.

And this is why buying a guidebook is such a lottery. If you’ve been to a city before and you’re looking to buy a guidebook on it for another trip, look for a review of a hotel or restaurant you know. Is it in there? Good. Does the review make it sound remotely like the place you know? Yes? Excellent. If it doesn’t list it or it describes it in a way that’s not like the place you know, leave the book on the shelf.

Just as an aside, we were relieved to find that our names aren’t mentioned at all in the current incarnation of that first book we originally authored. It’s somewhat petty of the publishers, seeing our content was original, but considering the state of the current edition, we’re actually grateful!

Pictured? One hotel in Northern Italy that in no uncertain terms lives up to its eco-friendly credentials, Vigilius Mountain Resort. This is a photo of our room. We actually stayed there. Do you trust us?

Our research last year for the Syria chapter of our recently released Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook required that we visit everything already in the book, along with many more sights that weren't in the guide. And while we loved visiting all of those "out of the way castles and ruins", when making decisions as to what to include and exclude in the manuscript we have to think about how much other readers might enjoy what may appear to be merely a pile of rubble to anyone but the most avid archaeological enthusiast. In some cases, the ruins of a castle may be rather spectacular (like the one pictured) and may well be worth the effort to get to. But most readers, who are staying in Syria for an average of five days, might not want to spend a long day travelling (or indeed several days) to get to the site, especially if the journey involves long waits between buses in the middle of nowhere and perhaps even a spot of hitchhiking to get there.

The other consideration we have is word count. We can't just keep adding sights to books, and therefore adding paragraphs and pages. In fact, for almost every book we ever worked on for Lonely Planet we were required to reduce rather than add new text. So, in order to add a few paragraphs to include some of those off-the-beaten-track places some readers would love us to include, we'd have to remove sights elsewhere. When it comes to making those decisions we have to ask ourselves whether we should cut a popular site that might be visited by thousands of travellers to include an out of the way castle that may get visited by only a few hundred people? And with a country like Syria (and, now, under the current political climate, also Lebanon), we have to give this serious thought. How many people are actually using our book and visiting these places? When we did our six week road trip around Syria we only bumped into around 20 other travellers. We were alone at most major sights.

It would be heavenly to write a book with an endless number of pages and complete freedom to include everything we wanted to. But it would also have to have a fee to match. And that's another interesting consideration. How many publishers are going to pay us to go to all those out-of-the-way sights that might only ever get visited by a few hundred travellers at most? Not Lonely Planet that's for sure. And probably not many other publishers either...

We've just received our author copies of our recently released Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook and I'm rather excited to see it in print as we put a lot of hard work into it. Admittedly, seeing a book for the first time is not as thrilling these days as it once was, especially as we've now written, contributed to and updated around 35 guidebooks. And it's even less exciting when Lonely Planet sends you a few mangled, well-thumbed copies, rather than issues that are hot off the presses and smell freshly printed! The fact that we researched it over a year ago, from April to June 2007, also takes a bit of the edge off it. Just thinking that some of it is already out of date makes me cringe. But such is the nature of publishing - books take forever to get from research through writing to manuscript submission, then through editing and author queries until they finally go to print...

I went online to see if there were any reviews of the book yet but unfortunately all I could find were a few Amazon.com reader reviews which, while attached to this edition, are actually for the last edition. Some were written 8 years ago and so apply to an ancient edition while one 2007 review applied to an edition we wrote that was already 4 years old, so obviously some content was out of date when the reader used it. Interestingly though, we used that edition when we were on the road last year and it was in pretty good shape. The way we research is to methodically check everything in the current book as we're travelling from town to town, retaining anything that's still open and is worthwhile, deleting or downgrading anything that's closed or is not as good as it once was, and then looking for places to replace any deletions. One reader writes of that edition: "It only gives you the most popular sites and then a few it claims are "off-the-beaten-track" but really aren't. It misses some of Syria's best out of the way castles and ruins." What he fails to consider is that we all travel differently. Some of us are more intrepid than others, and what might be a well-trodden sight for one reader might be well and truly "off-the-beaten-track" for other less adventurous travellers. And let's face it, Lonely Planet guides are mainstream books aimed to appeal to a wide cross-section of people. As someone who has been to Syria many times, when I next visit I won't be using a Lonely Planet or any other guidebook. My own well-thumbed and rather ragged version of Ross Burns' Monuments of Syria will be enough to guide me.

Pictured? My co-author/husband Terry at one of those out-of-the-way sights that may not be off-the-beaten-track enough for everyone. The first person who can identify the site gets the most mangled copy of the new guides that Lonely Planet sent me! How's that for incentive?

If you've been following the Lonely Planet author fraud scandal or the Thomas Kohnstamm Affair as some of us like to call it, and you've read the comments following online articles and visited Lonely Planet's travellers' forum Thorn Tree, then you may well think this spells the end for guidebook authors. Or at the very least you've now formed a bad impression of travel writers, that they plagiarize, treat the job as a paid vacation, don't visit every place they should, and trade freebies for positive reviews. The Thorn Tree posts have been especially unkind, even ugly, and often untrue (but then that forum is a monster), with criticism leveled at many LP books and accusations such as "I know xx xx (insert authors name) didn't even go to xxxx!" When in fact xx xx lives there, xx xx has a portfolio overflowing with published work on the place, and xxxx is the author's home! The impression seems to be guidebook publishers pay a pittance (when in fact, not all do), fees don't cover expenses (and some don't), and all authors are inexperienced 20 year-old hacks doing the job to travel for free. That's where I disagree. While there are a lot of hacks and a lot of 20-somethings partying around South America 'updating' guides (Let's Go writers are young), there are writers who are a whole lot older (some even ancient), who've been doing this work forever, consider it their profession, are married, have mortgages, have babies, grown-up children, even grandchildren (and whatever else communicates that not all writers make out on restaurant tables with waitresses in exchange for reviews). Thorn Tree members seem to think the industry should start with a clean slate and that they're just the ones to replace us, that travellers can get sufficient reliable travel information from Thorn Tree or Trip Advisor. Well, go for it, I say, because if there's no Lonely Planet, then there'll be no Thorn Tree. While some travellers might be happy to take advice from someone who knows their home town intimately but has never left it, or travellers who go on holidays twice a year and think that qualifies them to review hotels, I'm going to stick to recommendations by professional writers with travel expertise, who travel for a living. And I bet there are a lot of travellers out there who'll do the same. This isn't the end of the guidebook author at all, just a timely re-appraisal and re-appreciation of the role.

The image? A 'holiday' snap taken in Syria last year during 'research' for the Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guide. Just in case anyone needs proof that we were even there. Do you want to see my passport stamps too?

The Lonely Planet author fraud scandal has taken more turns than we did on the switchback riddled roads of Crete on our most recent research trip there. Now referred to as the Thomas Kohnstamm Affair by the Guardian, Gadling and others, the controversy hasn't yet begun to die the death some might have predicted. Google the topic and you'll get some 255+ articles and climbing, including blog posts. And the stories are still coming. While the mainstream media initially resorted to sensationalist headlines and regurgitating content off feeds, with little in the way of analysis, recent coverage is more considered, reflective and opinionated, and often coming from first-hand experience. Others are still resorting to attention-grabbing headlines to pull in readers and in those cases the discussion that follows in the comments is tending to be more insightful (especially from travellers) and the revelations more compelling (from guidebook writers). Those worth a look include Travel publishers slam Lonely Planet (The Bookseller); Which guidebooks can you trust (Times Online); Postcards from the edge of travel writing (The Independent); Why guidebooks have to lie (Sydney Morning Herald blog); The truth about writing Lonely Planet guidebooks (The Guardian); Writer's story rattles Lonely Planet contributors; and Guidebooks: don't believe everything you read (Times Online); and Derelict vs. Duty (The Perrin Post, Concierge). Readers have been asking me to write more about the travel writing process here and although that wasn't my intention in starting this blog, that doesn't seems like such a bad idea now, if just to show that we're not all like Thomas Kohnstamm.

As you can guess from the title, Travel Blogs: Hand-Picked Tales from the Road is a site featuring the best travel blogs produced by travellers and travel writers. There are regular featured blogs that enjoy the spotlight for a week, along with the Life of a Travel Writer series where professional travel writers are interviewed, the latest being this author. I've been asked by readers of this blog to write more about travel writing and research and share tips from the road, and I'll try to do that where I can. Aspiring writers should also check out Write to Travel, which offers writing advice, lists blogs and resources, runs an Interview with a Travel Writer series, and features a Travel Blog of the Week. This week one of my favorites, Pret a Voyager, is showcased. (Cool Travel Guide was featured back in December.) World Hum is another good resource for aspiring travel writers: read the recent interview with guidebook author Robert Reid. Rolf Pott's has a long-running travel writer profile series on Vagabonding, along with a fascinating series of podcasts, video and radio interviews.Then there's Gadling, which in February featured the post My First Stint at Guidebook Writing dispelling some of the myths surrounding the life of a travel writer. While I agree that our working lives aren't always as glam as people perceive them to be, as Catherine Bodry points out we can spend all day working in our pyjamas if we so desire! We could also sip a glass of wine (or two) while we work (hey, I'm looking out at the Mediterranean as I write, can you blame me?) or simply decide not to work at all if we choose (with no leave forms to fill out!). But the real beauty of being a travel writer is we get to just pack up and go, when, where and however we fancy, because that's what we do. Here's a toast to all the travel writers out there! I don't know about you, but I have a thing or two to celebrate.