15.5 years in, if I was starting Travelfish today, given the vastly changed landscape of online travel, here’s a few things I’d do differently & why:

1) Would not review individual hotels, instead would write about where to stay from a location POV.
Why: Google is eating this

2) Would not review individual sights and attractions, instead would have wrap pieces on how to fill a few days.
Why: Google is eating this

3) Would not review individual places to eat, instead would have wrap pieces on food/drink tips across a few days.
Why: Google is eating this

4) Essentially would not have individual reviews for anything with a lat/long.
Why: Google is eating this

5) Would have used a membership plug-in (eg Memberful) rather than write my own.
Why: Scales better, far more functionality, I’m not a good programmer & I want my life back

6) I’d have had two newsletters, one for paid members only & one free
Why: Nothing drives subscribers like a newsletter, so need the latter to grow the former

7) I’d have concentrated more on higher level trip planning (itineraries particularly)
Why: Google is still struggling to eat this

8) I’d have a members only podcast or some kinda audio thing
Why: travel is so audio rich & done well a great bit of value adding for members.

9) I’d have put more thought into over tourism and would not have covered some of the destinations we do.
Why: Do the inter webs really need another guide to Hoi An?

10) Would have had a far harder paywall from the getgo and would not have run contextual ads at all
Why: ads are a privacy train wreck & writers need to be paid

The one thing I would not have changed. Always always always pay your writers and no comps/media rates/fam trips etc

Would this work today? Dunno. But what I do know is in travel, Google has pivoted from the absolute enabler it was 15 years ago to the absolute destroyer.

Late addition. The above was a bit off the cuff & I didn’t expect it to receive the interest it has. Tks all for the comments & messages. If there was one thing I wish I’d read 15.5 yrs ago, it would be this: https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ Would greatly influence what I’d build today

Another late update as am procrastinating, we now earn more through membership subscriptions than all affiliate income combined. That’s as much a slow rise in subs as a precipitous fall in affiliate income (tks traffic drop + apps) but yeah, if you’re a subscriber, thank you.

And another thing I wouldn’t do again: write the codebase from scratch. Platforms like WP/Ghost etc far more robust than 15.5 years ago ha ha (well Ghost didn’t exist then anyways)

The comment on apps (booking, Agoda etc) I think their affiliate business essentially transformed to become a lead generation tool into their apps. Smart move (for them) as insulated them from Google. Although Agoda, your latest app update sux big time.

Once you’re using the app, esp for last minute bookings, little reason to go online (most of our bookings 48-24 hours out I was told by Agoda a while back).

Easily worst bit of advice that was given (and acted on ... and PAID for!): optimizing certain pages for search (fm a SEO dude) in a manner which involved a massive amount of splitting up & rewriting of material. Huge time sink when you have an editorial staff of zero.

Yes there was increased traffic to those pages, but the changes made for an extremely counter-intuitive experience for readers already on site. Not blaming the SEO dude, was my decision off of his advice, but yeah, careful who/what you optimize for and why.

More: relentless pillaging of material. Hello almost every online travel agent in vietnam around 8 years ago, just shameless. Again, in the end gave up chasing those clowns and thru aggressive link buying many of them now outrank us with material written by our writers.

In one case, when I still bothered to chase these clowns, they asked me to prove the Maps were ours, so I sent them the CorelDraw file (this is pre Gmaps being popularized, so we drew our own). Agent then used the Corel file to update our maps to add their branding. Oh Hanoi.

CorelDraw. Far out I am a dinosaur.

Random highlights or at least stuff that kinda makes me laugh now:

1) The 6-star resort in Thailand which found out I was there unannounced thanks to a friend who facilitated my entry. When we listed it (it was removed in a later update) they went feral, like totally feral.

I maintain the review was fair. But when their ranting went on and on I emailed them and told them how their staff had told me in a bar in the same destination, that they’d routinely sort out guests with all the drugs they wanted. Never heard from them again. Weird.

2: Ko Phi Phi (another overtourism trainwreck), maybe 10 years ago) a guesthouse owner asked our writer after he had asked one (knowing the person, probably 15) too many questions, he said "hey are you from Travelfish?" (we review anon)

and when the writer said yes, the owner kicked him out on the spot, got their pack, ran down from the guesthouse and threw it in the water treatment facility thing they have there. We didn't list that business.

3) The time I met a guy on KSR who told me he was a Travelfish writer. He wasn't.

4) Our first (and only I think!) mention in the New York Times. (thanks @fredamoon ) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/travel/frugal-family-medical-dental-tourism-bangkok-thailand-vacation.html

5) Very recent, but on flight back fm Sg, two TF readers were sitting behind me on the flight. They’d been following my trip down Peninsular Malaysia on Insta & when I walked into the cabin they picked me. I can’t tell you how exhausted I am in this photo lol. See me? Say hello!

Other stuff I wish I’d done sooner:
Add a donation thingy on the Twitter profile pinned post thing. Blown away by people’s response to that. Thank you

Oh back to the silly things...
About 9 years ago I did a trekking trip out of Luang Nam Tha in Laos. I was thinking of trying to sell a story on it (I HATE freelancing), so asked the group if they were all ok with me using pics of them in the story.

I never sold the story, but one of the pax STILL emails me occasionally asking about when it is going to run. So if you’re a travel publisher who wants a 9-year old story on trekking in Laos, please let me know so she can finally stop emailing me!

But jokes aside, takes a breath... have received much feedback off of this never ending thread about the “death of pro travel writing“ etc esp in the advent of crowdsourced opinion, which was a pretty small deal when we started back just after the dinosaurs died.

My take is your competing against UGC that is often good enough on the “should I go’ scale. I've always used Wat Pho in Bangkok as an eg of crowdsourced stuff, think first time I used it it had about 14k reviews. As of right now it has 50,151 reviews. https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g293916-d311043-Reviews-or7030-Wat_Phra_Chetuphon-Bangkok.html

If you take a look, you’ll see the page doesn't actually tell you much about the site, rather it is all opinion (Great, crap tuk tuk guy ripped me off, dodgy massage there, too many tourists etc). Maybe that is what readers want to know.

Our page ($ soz) by @DavidLuekens tells you more about the actual site https://www.travelfish.org/sight_profile/thailand/bangkok_and_surrounds/bangkok/bangkok/23 Now David is no grand expert in Thai Buddhism architecture etc (for that, ping @joecummings ), but both knows a ton more than me, & with due respect to Mich328 on TA, more than him too

What do readers want? & more importantly (at least for the publisher) what will readers pay for? In an ideal world (without GTravel crap shovelled in up top), where material is ranked according to how “useful“ it is, you’d expect authority (not meaning us) should rank.

But it is only useful if people read it. And because we now paywall about 70% of our sights, far fewer people read them. When I added the paywall to the sights pages, listings that ranked above 5 on page 1 were generally pushed to page 3 or 4.

Google explains this as a poor user experience. User clicks through to us, hits paywall and bounces back because they are not a member etc. This makes sense in the Google Alternative Universe. But more than anything else, this left me thinking well WTF.

We’ve always paid our writers, and when David write about it, his review was based on multiple trips to the site etc. We don’t do desk updating (HELLO Culture Trip you piece of shit), but if you’re on page 3 of Google, you may as well be on page 4,876,876.

So this is when I decided Fuck it. Working more on newsletters, reaching readers directly and all that stuff. The whole 1,000 true fans schtik I mentioned about 654 posts above. I think yes, there is a market for expertise in travel writing, even now, but it has to be paid for.

But yeah, I haz a rather large ship and it has a bit of a turning circle. Will get there eventually. Start small, find your 1,000 fans, work from there. In travel material, if you’re actually concerned about quality and feet on the ground, scale is a poison pill.

Ok on that note, back to writing about Koh Rong! Questions, feel free.