Description
With so much research in the travel, climate, culture and lifestyle space, are we, as travel journalists, missing out by not engaging it with more? Could we be finding even better hooks, picking up ideas on sustainable travel, gaining insights on local demographics, analysing changing cultural trends, identifying interesting patterns, or understanding how climate and geopolitics is shaping where we travel? And then using this knowledge and intel to add an extra layer to our pitches, give our stories more weight, and inform our writing? Could learning to use and correctly interpret quality data in the right way even give us brilliant ideas for reported ‘desk’ features, round-ups, or inspiration for a bigger story?
With travel media always changing, and the challenges of getting pitches noticed and ideas commissioned in ever-flowing inboxes, making your pitch stand out to an editor is crucial. This isn’t about going hard on stats and reports or overloading a pitch or feature with facts and stats; rather, how to leverage the insights we have in our pitches and features.
Join what promises to be an enlightening, interesting and inspiring discussion in this next webinar plus Q&A at the end – questions also welcome in advance. If you’ve missed previous webinars, you can watch past sessions on everything from successful pitching, developing your writing, and decolonising/modernising travel writing to topics such as smarter freelancing, working with PRs, mental health and wellbeing, and getting 2025-ready (last two are free webinars). All available here.
Travel Writing Webinars by Meera Dattani is supported by Talking Travel Writing. This webinar is the fifth event sponsored by Adventure Travel Networking (ATN).
About the panellists
Jenny Southan is the editor, founder and CEO of Globetrender, the world’s leading travel trend forecasting agency and online magazine dedicated to the future of travel, and the host of podcast, Blue Sky Thinking. An award-winning travel journalist, she also writes for publications such as Condé Nast Traveller and The Telegraph, and was formerly features editor of Business Traveller magazine, where she worked for 10 years. Jenny is also an experienced public speaker.
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Find out more at Globetrender
Kate Colquhoun is associate director at MMGY Grifco PR where her clients include travel brand Opodo, who produce travel reports, search data and travel trends which journalists can use (and request), and will share insights of driving stories using Opodo’s search and bookings data. Now a senior director on the MMGY Grifco team for six years, Kate is a former broadcast and feature journalist (BBC, Telegraph, Times, FT, national magazines), and has a highly developed sense of what makes a story.
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Laura Hall is a Copenhagen-based, UK freelance travel writer and the editor of Modern Scandinavian, a substack on life and culture in Scandinavia. She writes for BBC Travel, The Guardian, Adventure.com and many more, and in this webinar, will share her process on how she uses data to pitch, write and inform stories such as Looking at TV’s effect on travel and Trends shaping travel in 2025 for BBC Travel, and Meet the deinfluencers trying to burst social media’s ‘perfect travel’ bubble on Adventure.com. Her memoir, The Year I Lay My Head In Water is out in 2026 with Icon Books.
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Moderator
Meera Dattani is the founder of Travel Writing Webinars, executive editor at Adventure.com, and a freelance travel and culture journalist with bylines in Condé Nast Traveller, National Geographic Traveller, GreenTraveller, Olive magazine, Wanderlust, BBC Travel, and others. Former Chair and Events Director of the British Guild of Travel Writers, she is also a mentor, awards judge, interviewer, and often speaks on panels about travel writing, pitching, DEAI and sustainable travel.
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This is the eighth in a series of webinars curated and hosted by travel journalist and editor Meera Dattani. This session is sponsored by Adventure Travel Networking (ATN), an award-winning organisation founded by Pru Goudie that promotes adventure and experiential travel with a positive impact. As well as an annual two-day hybrid Conference & Marketplace in London, the twice-a-year spring/autumn ATN Media Meet-up connects the adventure travel community with key travel media during an informal networking event with a panel session. If you write about positive impact adventure/experiential travel, contact Pru via the webform.
Thanks also to Talking Travel Writing who support and promote these events. TTW is a Substack newsletter that promises to demystify the travel media for freelancers forging a career in travel writing. Follow on Instagram and Facebook.
