Interview with Terence Carter of Grantourismo travel site

Recently HomeAway Holiday-Rentals announced a major new foray into the world of social media. The holiday home rental company has hired husband-and-wife team travel writer Lara Dunston and photographer Terence Carter for a year-long project called Grantourismo.

Lara Dunston & Terence Carter, Grantourismo duo

The idea is that Lara and Terry will travel around the world – 24 locations in 12 months – and stay in holiday home rentals rather than hotels, all with the goal of experiential travel. They will create multimedia content for the site at Grantourismotravels.com and also tweet at @gran_tourismo. Marrakesh is one of the first destinations.

The concept intrigued me because the topic of how travel writers, photographers and bloggers make a living in an era of publisher decline is much on my mind. I’ve recently discussed the issue of press trips for bloggers but that is just one aspect – the bigger question is what are the business models to support travel content? I believe there is not just one answer and we will see a proliferation of business models. This seems to be a good example of one the new opportunities for travel content creators.

Terry answered some questions for me.

Roaming Tales: How did the idea come about?

Terry Carter: For a few years now we’ve been lamenting the fact we’ve had to travel too fast and been too busy for our travels to have any significant meaning. We know a lot of places really well, but the ones we have the greatest affinity with are the ones where we’ve ‘pitched tent’, staying long enough to rent an apartment and settle in. There’s nothing wrong with spending a few days in a place and moving on – particularly if you’ve never been before – but when you get a taste of somewhere you like, we find going back and spending more ‘quality’ time there really enriching. We’d been planning our Grantourismo project for a couple of years – our original idea was to do one destination a month for a year – and somewhat serendipitously HomeAway Holiday-Rentals was looking for travel writers to undertake a very similar project.

RT: Where are you planning to go on your grand tour?

TC: The itinerary is still a work in progress, so stay tuned… but we can say that it will include some of the classic Grand Tour destinations like France and Italy, but also places that more off-the-beaten-track (for some), like Montenegro and Costa Rica.

RT: Have you stayed in holiday rentals before?

TC: We’ve stayed in lots of rentals before – studios, apartments and villas, everywhere from Turkey to Argentina – for anything from a week to two months, mainly when writing books.

RT: What do you see as the pros and cons?

Sitting area of Marrakesh holiday home, one of the first Grantourismo destinations

TC: The longer you need to stay, the more sense a rental makes. It’s more affordable than a hotel and you get more out of it because you’re becoming better acquainted with the place and getting out of the tourist zone by shopping local markets, drinking at neighborhood bars etc. You establish a closer connection to a place. Even if you go shopping at a market while staying at a hotel, often you can’t put that lovely bottle of wine, cheese and snacks in the mini-bar because of those stupid sensors.

Other pros for rentals are the cons of staying in a hotel: trying to make it down for breakfast service after a late night, getting charged for an espresso when you get there, and having to put up with people acting like they’ve never seen a buffet before; these days ‘do not disturb’ signs seem to be treated with as much contempt as red traffic lights in Beirut; the power going off when cleaners remove the damn room cards while you’re trying to recharge batteries or download photos… I guess we stay in a lot of hotels!

Cons really depend on how much you use a hotel concierge, enjoy room service, and raid the mini-bars. For us though, we’re finding a decent concierge, edible room service, and mini-bars that aren’t offensively overpriced increasingly rare. Interesting independently owned hotels often read much better on the website than they are in real life. We’ve had appalling service at ‘boutique’ properties where you may as well have booked a stylish apartment. Like a hotel, the cons really depend on the actual accommodation – the standard of kitchens can vary dramatically, parking can be a problem, perhaps the website didn’t mention there were six flights of stairs, or maybe you’ve simply chosen the wrong type of apartment or selected a part of town that doesn’t match your interests.

RT: What sort of content will you be producing? Reviews, narrative, video, photography etc?

TC: All of the above! We have a series of themes we want to explore – experiential travel, slow and sustainable travel, living like locals, and ‘voluntourism’. We’ll be exploring these in each destination, and we’ll be sharing those stories regardless of the medium. Ultimately, it’s all about the experience.

RT: How will you and the client measure success?

Salon area of Marrakesh holiday home, one of the first Grantourismo destinations

TC: Success for us will be really feeling like we’ve been able to get under the skin of a destination – that means we can speak more of the language than when we arrived, that we feel like we know the place and know some people, that we’re coming away having learned a few new things – and that we’ve produced quality content that reflects our experiences in the best possible way. Obviously it’s a marketing exercise for HomeAway, and they want website hits, but they sincerely want us to fully experience each place and communicate the appeal of the enriched and authentic experiences that you can have by settling in and staying longer. They could have just spent their budget on Google ads but they chose to embark on this instead, so bravo to them.

RT: Why did this appeal to you? What are the aims for you both personally, beyond client satisfaction?

TC: 2010 will be our fifth year of continuous travel so we wanted to tie up some loose ends and explore some ideas we have developed about travelling before we settle down again. Personally, we wanted more enriching experiences that warrant more reflective writing than the brief encounters we often have that are only useful for guidebook reviews and ‘top ten’ lists. Lara is using the experiences as more material for a PhD project she started years ago that she wants to resume and we’re both writing a book about the year – and perhaps one about all five years!

RT: How does the financial side work? What expenses are you responsible for? Are you paid or just paid in kind?

TC: We’re a professional writing and photography team, so this isn’t a barter situation. HomeAway have contracted us for a year and are providing our accommodation, paying for our flights, and we’re being paid proper industry rates to produce quality content about our experiences. We pay for everyday expenses, like groceries, as we do on any project. We have complete editorial freedom, we keep copyright, and we share certain rights with HomeAway. Those points were not negotiable and we would not have accepted the gig without them, and we were fortunate that HomeAway really believes in the project and respects that. We were already making a good enough living to not have to write advertorial! Some people find that hard to understand, but HomeAway don’t want fluff, they want quality writing that evocatively and insightfully describes the experiences that can be had staying in rentals.

RT: Are you planning to continue with other writing? What sort of projects?

TC: We’re writing a book about the experience and we’ll continue to pitch travel stories as we find things that are interesting, but they’ll be project-related experiences. We’ve really stretched ourselves in recent years, so we’re determined that 2010 will be much more focused.

RT: What do you think this project means for the future of travel blogging?

TC: We don’t want to wade into the travel writing versus travel blogging debate. We’ve been hired as a writing and photography team to create words and pictures about our experiences. Throughout our careers we’ve worked in film, video, sound, multimedia, photography, and print, so we can easily move between formats. The chief medium of delivery for this project is the web, but we’re also been briefed to write for print, and produce small videos if we have time. We’ve never seen ourselves purely as travel writers or travel bloggers (neither of us have tried to make money from our personal travel blogs), just a writer and photographer team relaying our experiences as we travel. We blog when we have something to say, not just to keep content ticking over to generate hits, and for this project we’re being paid per word, not by advertising clicks. Having said that, who knows, perhaps we’ll see more companies starting to approach writers/bloggers to do similar projects, but I’m not really engaged enough in the whole travel blogging world to be crystal ball gazing.

RT: What makes a travel blog good in your opinion? Can you name three that you particularly enjoy reading?

TC: To be honest, I mainly read photography sites/blogs, chef’s blogs and when I can’t remember a recipe, I Google it! Lara regularly reads travel blogs. I know she likes a lot of blogs by fellow travel writers and she regularly reads Pret A Voyager, Primitive Culture and My Marrakesh. For us, a good blog needs to be engaging, be well written, have a unique voice, and because I worked as a book designer and web designer, needs to look good. Far too many travel blogs out there are really ugly and I personally find it hard to wade through the crap and advertising to find the actual content.

RT: What are your tips for travellers to the Middle East and to travellers more generally?

TC: For travelers to the Middle East, go with an open mind and at least a few phrases of the language. Travellers more generally, make sure you’re doing what you really want to do! Do your research. We’ve seen so many couples fighting over what to do, people on tours who are mindlessly bored, and people heading into restaurants that are clearly tourist traps. Research is the key! Reading guidebooks or blogs/websites or talking to locals – preferably a combination of all three.

RT: What are your tips for people wanting to be location independent in their jobs?

TC: To be honest, that’s not something we really think about. Our work requires us to travel and we need to be able to work from anywhere, whether it’s a hotel room or airport lounge, and at anytime. At the moment, we’re working two ‘days’ – doing the day shift on Australian time and then starting all over again when HomeAway begin in the UK, which is our evening, so as you can imagine we’re getting very little sleep! I guess the real key is to be flexible, have a good work ethic and be focused.

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