Roaming Tales

The Gooseberry Fool, the culinary sister site to Roaming Tales, is hosting the Carnival of Cities next week. Submissions are accepted as usual for any posts on the theme of cities (and mid-size to large towns) but this week I am particularly keen to read any posts with a food related theme. Perhaps your city has a fantastic restaurant or farmers’ market? Or perhaps food featured prominently in your travels to more far-flung city destinations?

This week the event is hosted on Where Next?, the travel blog on Away.com, and it seems the entrants were channelling my interest telepathically because there is already a bit of a culinary theme happening, with posts on the Linwood Sausage Factory in Cincinatti and the Oyster bar in Grand Central Station in New York.

Please send the entries as usual via the carnival submission form. Entries received after Tuesday lunch time (British time) will be sent to next week’s host, so be sure to get your entries in early. Posts should be no more than a week old. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Note: I am sorry for the hiatus on the Save Money in London series - this will return after the weekend.

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Train company First Great Western has abolished shared sleeper compartments on trains and will force single travellers to pay a supplement. The company has cited privacy concerns as its motivation.

“It is considered more appropriate in the modern age to allow people their privacy. You wouldn’t expect to share a hotel room with a stranger and nor should you expect to share a sleeper carriage with someone you don’t know.”

On the midnight London-Cornwall run, couples will continue to pay £30 each for a sleeper but a solo passenger will now pay £40. Instead of accommodating up to 24 people in its sleeper carriages, there is now space for only 12 if everyone travelled alone.

I think this is a step in the wrong direction. With the planet in the state it is in, we need to be doing everything we can to make it easier and more economical to travel by train - or at least not by air. This will reduce availability for everyone and make it more expensive for singles. I might not expect to share a hotel room with a stranger but I would expect to share a hostel dormitory or an aeroplane cabin with a stranger and the same goes for a sleeper carriage. It’s usual to segregate strangers by gender (while friends can opt to share mixed cabins) and I think that’s appropriate.

When I went to the Arctic in 2006 to see polar bears I found it a painful irony that I had very few alternatives to flying in getting there. I tried to organise train and ferry transport to get from London to the departure point in Oslo. But the ferry crossing from Newcastle to Stavanger or Bergen in Norway would have cost me £500 without a car because the company’s policy was to make me book an entire cabin at double the cost. That was one way and does not include the cost of travelling from London to Newcastle or the Norwegian coast to Oslo. The journey would have taken over a day but that was not the deal breaker for me - I simply couldn’t afford to pay over a grand when I was already paying thousands for the trip and the cost of a flight was £100 return.

Apparently other UK train companies are considering following suit. Fortunately, First Great Western is not asking people to pay double but it sets a worrying principle. I imagine that there are a lot of single travellers on trains, and the London-Cornwall and London-Scotland legs are particularly popular with business travellers. If revenues dip from having more berths booked out by one person paying £40 rather than two people paying £60, they might rethink their policy. Then again, they might just raise the single supplement to compensate for the shortfall.

Surely this should be optional? If someone is very concerned about privacy, there is nothing to stop them booking the second bed in the compartment. But for most people, surely gender segregation is enough?

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Yesterday I shared my own experience in running this site and my food blog, The Gooseberry Fool, and asked how big the travel blogging niche actually is. The difference in traffic between the two sites has surprised me but I wasn’t sure how indicative it was, so I decided to look at it a little more scientifically.

I have ventured into the offline world to analyse the circulation data of travel magazines and cookery magazines in the UK. The figures given are from the Audit Bureau of Circulations and refer to the July-December 2007 period. The next figures, covering January-June 2008, will be published in August.

This just looks at magazines and specifically those magazines that choose to audit their circulation. It doesn’t include websites or newspaper supplements, but I think it is quite revealing all the same.

In the ‘Leisure Interests: Holiday & Travel’ category, the following magazines are audited: High Life, Holiday, Hotline, Livewire, Conde Nast Traveller, Orient-Express Magazine, The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Traveller. The total circulation for all titles is an average of 857,648 per issue, down 5.4% compared with the same period in 2006.

In the category, which is rather chauvinistically entitled ‘Women’s interest: Cookery & Kitchen’, the total circulation for all issues is an average 9.4 million (9,439,937), up 1.8% year on year. The titles covered include: Asda Magazine, Tesco Magazine, Sainsbury’s Fresh Ideas, BBC Good Food, Sainsbury’s Magazine, Waitrose Food Illustrated, delicious, Olive, Easy Cook, Good Food Vegetarian Special, Easy Food and Fresh.

That’s 857,648 for travel v 9.4 million for food? That would make the food niche more than 10 times bigger than travel!

But wait! That’s not the full picture.

Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Somerfield and Waitrose are all British supermarkets and Asda, Tesco and Somerfield’s magazines are free. However, Sainsbury’s Magazine and Waitrose Food Illustrated are NOT free but sold in stores for prices close to a normal news-stand cover price.

So if you exclude the free magazines, the total average circulation is 1.4 million (1,395,577 to be precise). That’s still nearly twice the size of travel.

But it turns out the travel niche also has free magazines. High Life is BA’s in-flight magazine. Hotline is Virgin Trains’ customer magazine. Livewire is GNER (another train network)’s magazine. Orient-Express is free to customers staying in Orient-Express hotels or travelling on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. Holiday is a free magazine for members of RCI Holiday, which is a timeshare company. Only 1% of Traveller’s circulation is not free.

That leaves just Conde Nast Traveller, which has an average issue circulation of 85,106 (up 0.4% from 2006), and Sunday Times Travel, which has an average circulation of 47,503, up a respectable 13.8% compared with the year before. That’s a total of 132,609, still less than a tenth of the 1.4 million paid-for food magazines.

Even if you exclude ALL supermarket magazines (even the ones that cost money) then the total number of food magazines sold is 749,008. That’s still five or six times more than 132,609.

The last thing I want to do as a travel blogger is talk down travel blogs - what I really want to do is promote the sector. But as a journalist, I am also interested in truth, and my analysis is so far leading me to believe that food is considerably bigger than travel. Many general magazines have a travel section but they also often have a cookery section. Newspapers have travel supplements but they also publish recipes, restaurant reviews and investigative features on food issues. Also, the ABC figures just refer to cookery magazines but food is a much wider category than cookery, and restaurant reviews are a big niche in the blogosphere as well.

What do you guys think? Do the UK magazine figures surprise you? Are my conclusions right? If not, why not? I would love to see some evidence to the contrary.

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You might recall when the finalists for the 2008 Bloggies came out, I drew attention to the fact that there was not a single travel site nominated. There was no travel blog category and travel blogs had not made the cut in any of the general categories. By contrast there were 11 food blogs among the 180 finalists. Food had a category of its own but food blogs were also well represented in the general categories.

The exclusion of travel from the Bloggies prompted outrage from the travel writing community - there was heated debate on the Travelwriters.com forum and other blogs. My feeling at the time was that travel bloggers had not created enough of a community compared with other niches such as food bloggers. I’m grateful for initiatives such as the Carnival of Cities (thanks to Nerd’s Eye View for hosting this week), but I still believe there is more that can be done to raise the profile of travel blogging.

However, I’m also beginning to suspect that travel is not as big a niche as we might think.

As well as Roaming Tales, I also run a food blog called The Gooseberry Fool. Both blogs have been running for about nine months so I feel that I am in a position to comment on my experiences so far. I have put the same amount of effort into developing both blogs and I have written roughly the same amount of content for both blogs (actually I have written more content for the travel one). I have also put the same effort into networking my blogs (entering carnivals, including both URLs in my email signature etc) and they have both benefited from a few pick-ups by social media (one of my biggest referrals for Roaming Tales is StumbleUpon for my post on the TARDIS-style police boxes throughout the UK).

Yet, the food blog is getting many more readers than the travel blog. Until about February this year the traffic was roughly even for both, but since then the food blog has pulled away considerably. In the last month it has had 2.5 times the number of both unique visitors and page impressions as the travel blog. The biggest difference seems to be Google referrals. People come to my food site because they are searching for ‘rhubarb’ or ‘beetroot’. They don’t come to the travel blog when searching for ‘Nicaragua’ or ‘Bruges’ (or at least not as much).

The other thing I’m noticing is that I get food ads on my food blog but I only occasionally get travel ads on my travel blog, but also get more general ads such as personal finance and dating. I’m not sure why that is.

As I see it, there are a few possible explanations for the relative success of the food blog, but I’m not sure which one is correct.

1. Travel content online is a more crowded field and it is less likely that someone searching for travel information will land on my blog, compared with another blog, a newspaper travel section online, or a commercial travel site. The counter argument is that food is also a crowded field.
2. My food writing is better than my travel writing. I’m not convinced about this, especially since my travel site benefits from having my travel articles as well as ordinary blog posts. However, it is possible that I have been lucky with my choice of topics on the food blog.
3. People are simply not as interested in reading about travel on the web as they are about food. This is no doubt controversial suggestion for travel writers and it would mean that the Bloggies was reflective of the wider public. But it could be true. People eat more than they travel, after all.

What do you guys think? Is there something unique about my blogs or is this more indicative of a general trend. Why do you think this is?

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The rest of the series on how visitors can save money in London will be published next week

You can read the first two posts in the series here:

Part 1: Transport

Part 2: Free sightseeing

In future posts we will look at cheap entertainment, accommodation and food.

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The good news is that some of London’s biggest attractions don’t cost a penny. Here are three ways you can see the sights of London for free.

1. Museums and art galleries
All public museums and galleries are free (though donations are always appreciated). The British Museum has been free since it opened in 1753 and as a pure museum (rather than a museum / art gallery like the Louvre in Paris or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC) it is unrivalled in the world. This is where you can see some of the world’s greatest treasures, including the Parthenon Marbles, and the Rosetta Stone. It’s also a very cool building with the stately 18th century architecture combined with the Norman Foster-designed Great Court.

Other major museums and galleries, such as the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate galleries, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Natural History Museum, have been free since 2000 and are funded by public lottery money.

2. Parks and gardens

London is deservedly famous for its parks and gardens. Go for a walk or a picnic in Regent’s Park, join the skaters in Hyde Park (or take to the road on an organised street skate), visit the Peter Pan statue or the Princess Diana Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens, feed the ducks in Green Park or St James’s Park. (See the Royal Parks website).

Slightly further afield, you can visit the Japanese Garden in Holland Park, picnic by the Buddhist Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park, go horse riding where Henry VIII hunted at Richmond Park (the horse riding is not free, though the park is), or enjoy the best views in London from Parliament Hill after swimming in the natural pools at Hampstead Heath.

An honourable mention goes to Highgate Cemetery, where Karl Marx and George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, are buried among others. There’s a £3 entry fee so it’s not quite free but it’s good value.

3. Walks

Walking is a good way to see the city and keep fit. Guided walks are good value but if you don’t want to pay, there is nothing to stop you from taking your own walking tour. One of my favourite walks is from London Bridge (through Borough Market if it’s a Friday or Saturday) and along South Bank, past the Shakespeare’s Globe and the Tate Modern, and across the Millennium Footbridge to St Paul’s Cathederal. Other areas worth exploring include around Buckingham Palace and Mayfair, Kensington and Chelsea, Tower Bridge, and Hampstead. Thanks to English Heritage, buildings are marked with blue plaques to show where famous Londoners of the past have lived.

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This is part two of a five-part series on how to save money when visiting London. Yesterday we looked at transport and tomorrow we will investigate cheap entertainment. Don’t forget to add Roaming Tales to your favourites or subscribe via RSS.

Please share your money saving tips in the comments field.

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London is a fabulous place for a holiday - it’s a world capital brimming with everything from the world’s best museum to some of the most exciting rock venues. Unfortunately it’s also one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Visiting the British capital is guaranteed to take a chunk of change out of any travel budget. With the Euro at a record high, it’s never been better value for Europeans and Australians too are enjoying historically favourable exchange rates. But it’s still expensive.

Since the US dollar is currently worth about half the value of the pound, a trip to London must be particularly painful for Americans right now. There’s a reason why so many Brits headed to New York armed with a spare suitcase for some half-price Christmas shopping last year.

Don’t let that put you off. Whether you’re in to fashion or food, London is a seriously exciting place right now and there’s never been a better time to visit. Instead, take some tips from a local on how to make your dough stretch further.

In part one of a five-part series, I look at how to save money on transport costs.

1. Get Connected
If, like most visitors, you are flying into Heathrow, don’t blow 15 quid on the Heathrow Express to Paddington. Instead get the Heathrow Connect - it takes half an hour rather than 15 minutes but it costs a third of the price. If you really need to get there quickly, then go with the Heathrow Express but book online. It’s still more expensive than the Connect but you’ll save £1 off the cash price.

If you are getting off a long flight, don’t be tempted to get a taxi all the way from Heathrow. It’s hideously expensive but it’s also very easy and very fast to get the Connect or Express trains. If you need to, you can fall into a cab once you get to Paddington. Of course, the frugal option is to use public transport and from Paddington you can get the Underground (London’s subway system, usually known as the Tube) almost anywhere and it’s also a hub for trains out of London.

There is a Tube service from Heathrow Airport but don’t bother if you are going to central London - it costs the same as the Connect service but it’s much slower and it can often be very crowded. It’s only worth using the Tube if you are headed somewhere in west London on the Piccadilly Line.

2. Get an Oyster
Okay, so the Thames isn’t known for its shellfish, but an Oyster is also the name for the pre-paid card you can use across the London transport network, including the Tube, overground trains and buses. The cheapest cash ticket for a single Tube journey costs an eye-watering £4 but with an Oyster the equivalent trip is just £1.50. If you are there for more than a couple of days and plan to use the public transport network extensively then it’s worth buying a three-day or weekly ticket.

You don’t need a car in central London and if you insist on having one, it’s going to set you back £8 a day on top of car hire and fuel. This is because the central part of London is subject to the Congestion Charge. Parking is also limited and parking inspectors are very diligent in fining and even clamping wrongly parked cars. You have been warned!

3. Travelling on from London
If you are planning to travel elsewhere in the UK or Europe by train, then book ahead for the cheapest fares. You can check train timetables and fares for Britain on the National Rail website and book directly with the train company or with ticketing sites such as Trainline. The best prices are when you book at least two weeks in advance and avoid travelling on a Friday. The trains are not as good as on the Continent (they are more crowded, less technologically advanced and the tracks are not so well maintained) but they are still usually faster than driving.

Trains to France or Belgium are definitely faster and more comfortable than flying. It’s just two hours by train from the centre of London to the centre of Paris or Brussels with Eurostar. Again, it’s cheaper if you book ahead and the booking window is 120 days.

For more information on train travel in Europe (and around the world), check out The Man in Seat 61.

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Please come back tomorrow for the second part in the series, looking at what’s free to see and do in London. Or subscribe via RSS so you don’t miss a thing!

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Until recently, the only people arguing against expansion of Heathrow Airport were protest groups campaigning against climate change or the increased flight noise west of London. Following the debacle that was the opening of Terminal 5, the tide now seems to be shifting.

Bob Ayling, the chief executive of British Airways from 1996 to 2000, came out against expansion of Heathrow in today’s Sunday Times.

The UK government has long argued that the expansion of Heathrow is necessary for the future competitiveness of the UK economy. But recent reports indicate the BAA and the government bent the facts to make the case.

Ayling argues that building a third runway would be a “costly mistake” and that BAA is pursuing a flawed business model by chasing transfer traffic, since most transfer passengers buy little more than a cup of tea and therefore cost the airport more than they bring in revenue.

Meanwhile, the new London mayor Boris Johnson is apparently in favour of building a new airport in the Thames estuary, a plan that has been on the cards for decades but never come to fruition. That wouldn’t do anything to deal with the underlying questions on aviation policy in an era of climate change, but it would potentially ease congestion and it would give long-suffering residents of west London and villages and countryside around Heathrow a break from the incessant noise and pollution. (Most of the flights would take off and land over the sea).

Of course, London already has four other airports - Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and London City - and yet Heathrow remains inexplicably popular for both airlines and passengers.

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