Travel writing’s main purpose is to introduce us to the concept of the "Other", as well as how we engage the Self with the world (Calzati 2). This is portrayed through personal thoughts and commentaries on a destination, personal travel stories, and details of the trips, such as daily routines (Akehurst 54). One unique writing style that I tend to use for my travel blogs, but not for any other writing, is the “Hemingway" style as described in https://draftin.com. I type all of my thoughts at once without pausing to backtrack and fix grammatical errors because I feared that I would forget small details the longer I waited to write them all down. This is one advantage of the internet because I can type my sentences faster than I can hand write.

A typical travel blog is an electronic first-person story that includes individual entries pertaining to planned, current, or past travel plans that are linked together to a common theme, such as 'Travels to England'. A travel blog can be seen as similar to online diaries since it is commonly written by tourists to notify friends and family of their experience (Banyai & Glover 268). This brings up another characteristic of a travel blog that I prefer over handwritten postcards or writing in a travel journal, you are able to broadcast your travel experiences to a large audience through the use of one platform, such as WordPress. You do not have to create multiple versions of writing and then send them to different places, a travel blog allows you to post it in one location which you can distribute to as many people as you want.

Travel blogs are mostly written voluntarily by fellow travellers. Your publication typically does not give you profit, unlike travel guides or other travel literature found in bookstores. Bloggers are able to choose when and what to write and how they want their content to be displayed. It can be as unstructured as they want it to be, but usually conforms to a chronological order at least (Panteli et al. 366). Travel blog websites also allows travel blogs to include “comments, suggestions, advice, directions, maps, photos and videos, links to related web sites and to external information, links to other travelers, RSS, trackbacks, taglines, archives, permanent links and blogrolls" (Vrana & Zafropoulos 596), which can explain how travel writing can be seen as a hypertext. The inclusion of multimedia and other features to travel blog content permit readers the ability to refer to outside sources to comprehend one’s travels. The content is not just limited to the blogger’s perspective because we can view the photos and videos and make our own interpretations of these various travel destinations. However, word-of-mouth communication and tangible travel writing materials can only provide us with the speaker or author’s point of view and experience, which can be limiting to the audience in terms of comprehending travel experiences in objective ways.

A disadvantage of travel blogging is that it becomes a chore to regularly update your web log and can often lead to the content remaining static for months (Akehurst 57). I have personally experienced this with my own blog where I originally thought that weekly posts would be an easy task. After a few weeks, I started to get bored with the whole idea of a travel blog and found that some of my travel experiences were ones that I have experienced for myself and grew too lazy to share with others. Going to visit a famous monument such as the Stonehenge is a prime example. I feel like reiterating my initial thoughts and feelings about the experience can be insincere and consequently discourage me from including it in my blog. However, despite these initial feelings, I continued to voluntarily write the rest of my blog until the end of my exchange trip. This experience illustrates how blogs, especially travel blogs have a short life span (Akehurst 56). Every trip has an end and once you reach your home country, there is no purpose in continuing the blog. Once I returned to Canada, I ceased to post new content to my blog despite going on other travels later in the summer. I created my travel blog with the intent of including experiences from my study abroad semester and once that was fulfilled, I found the blog to be complete.

In addition Chen et al. state how “a blog can be seen as an asynchronous and many-to-many channel for conveying travel-related electronic word-of-mouth" (787). We used to view travel agencies and country representatives as a main method for retrieving information about travel advice, however travel blogs have transformed that for us. It acts as a digitized word-of-mouth device. This notion is supported by travel sites such as www.tripadvisor.com and www.travelpod.com, which provides a space for experienced travellers to include “diaries of travel experiences". This illustrates how a non-typical blogging website can include elements of travel blogging. But most importantly, some travel book publications have expanded onto the internet, the most famous example being www.lonelyplanet.com, which started out as a single travel guide book in 1975 and expanded into a series and then a webpage where users can include their own travel stories in travel blog form (Akehurst 54).