An Infographic Profile of the Modern Travel Blogger

An Infographic Profile of the Modern Travel Blogger from the Sandymount Hotel in Dublin, Ireland, takes a closer look at answering the question “Who are these travel bloggers?”

As today marks the start of the TBEX European Conference – the world’s largest gathering of travel bloggers, writers and new media content creators – we thought we would celebrate their choice of Dublin as this years’ venue with an infographic profile of the modern travel blogger.

Today and tomorrow, Dublin will play host to scores of travel bloggers and writers, but what makes a contemporary travel blogger? It’s an interesting and pertinent question – it’s a demanding occupation (albeit a fun one!) and one that requires a huge amount of hard work, dedication and the potential of not making a huge amount of money, at least in the formative years.

So what’s the average profile of the modern travel blogger? How old are they? What countries do they visit? How do they monetise their writing and what contemporary technology do they utilise to facilitate their writing? To answer these questions and numerous others, we completed an in-depth survey of travel bloggers, giving us some revealing and unique insights into what makes up a travel blogger.

Rather than present all our finding in a page of text, we thought we’d turn them into a far more eye-catching format, so here’s our infographic profile of the modern travel blogger:

The design is clean with a great color palette.  It’s easy for readers to look through the information quickly.

A few of the statistics are shown in text only, while others are visualized.  The stats in text only will be perceived as less important by readers, and I don’t think that was the intent of the designers.  If the data is important enough to include in the infographic, they should also be visualized.

Thanks to David for sending in the link!

The Allergic Traveler's Companion Guide

Having allergies can really put a damper on a vacation. To help cut down on the inconvenience, The Allegic Traveler’s Companion Guide infographic from sylvane.com has compiled information on the top places to visit, to stay, and to avoid.

Vacationers and business travelers alike are seeking the same thing in a hotel room: a comfortable place to rest and recharge. But if you have allergies or asthma, the challenge of finding such a hotel is nothing to sneeze at. 

We wanted to find out which major cities and hotels provide the most allergy-friendly accommodations, so we partnered with AllerPassMD, an independent consumer rating organization, on a research project to do just that. Read on to find out all about allergy-free travel, and you can visit AllerPassMD.com to find hypoallergenic hotel ratings for specific cities. 

Before you plan your next trip - be it for business, pleasure, or a little bit of both - prime yourself with The Allergic Traveler’s Companion Guide. 

Thanks to Brian for sending in the link!

What Guests Want...at Hotels

Hotels.com has released the 2013 version of their Global Hotel Amenities Survey, summarized in the infographic What Guests Want.  Part of an ongoing series from Hotels.com on their press site, the infographic takes a fun look at what hotel-stayers value most.  Apparently everyone wants free WiFi!

You just checked into your favorite hotel and are ready to enjoy all it has to offer. What kind of amenities inspire you? We surveyed travelers from all over the world to see what perks they valued most when spending a night away from home. 

The infographic is an additional content piece to the release of the complete survey, Global Travelers Want To Stay Connected And Comfy.  The Hotels.com press site is primarily targeted at an audience of hotel industry executives and the news media, and they maintain a dedicated infographics page.  The addition of the infographic to the press release helps to make the often dry survey data more engaging, and additional press releases were also published to highlight some of the hidden gems in the data: Danish Hotel Guests Most Honest; Americans Come In 23rd Place

Designed by Jeremy Yingling with InfoNewt, the infographic is essentially an executive summary of the much larger survey report that Hotels.com publishes each year.

I’ve posted a short, behind-the-scenes Q&A with Hotels.com about their experiences using infographics on the InfoNewt blog.

How to Travel Like a President

It is almost election time! Hard to imagine how the presidential candidates were able to accomplish visiting so many cities in the amount of time they did! Flipkey crunched some numbers and put together their How to Travel Like a President infographic. They show the candidate’s mode of travel, what they ate and where they stayed. If you want to see the country, I’d recommend traveling with the president! Just make sure they are the ones to flip the bill. 

With less than a month to go before America heads to the polls, we keep thinking about the candidates hitting the road. After all, for those of us here at FlipKey, visiting over 25 towns across the country in a month sounds like a dream job – but who can afford it? Over the past four months, President Obama’s campaign travel expenses have totaled a cool $3 million, which may have factored into his decision to skip this year’s summer vacation. Meanwhile, challenger Mitt Romney has shown that the first step to becoming president is traveling like one: the former governor has poured close to $10 million into travel for himself and his staff. Looking at these price tags, we decided to go to work and find out exactly what it takes to travel like a president…

I like the different approach to data surrounding the election campaigns.  The data is a little bit skewed because of the date range represented.  The numbers for Obama only show 2 days on the road, so hotel and food costs are very small.

Good list of sources, but missing a copyright and a URL link back to the infographic landing page on the FlipKey site.

Thanks to Claire for sending in the link!

Sip Statistics 2012

A great way to wrap up the summer, the Sip Statistics infographic was a joint design project with Hotels.com, TGIFriday’s and InfoNewt (my company).

The Hotels.com® Sip StatisticsTM uses data from T.G.I. Friday’s to help travelers do as the locals do and follow their drink-clinations by identifying favorite drinks in popular cities. T.G.I. Friday’s has also provided cool new summer drink recipes below to keep that summer feeling going all year round. 

The design combines Hotels.com Average Daily Room Rate information from the top U.S. cities with the geographic popularity of TGIFriday’s top summer drinks in those same cities.  A fun, engaging way to share some internal information only available from these two companies.

The room rates are clearly compared in rank order with the bar graph linked to the map locations, and the most popular drinks are also shown in rank order for each city using both unique drink galss icons and color coding.  The icons and color coding are carried down the design to the recipe section, where the drink content proportions are shown with a pie chart visualization.

Thanks to the teams at both Hotels.com and TGIFriday’s!

Global Hotel Price Changes

A new infographic from Hotels.com showing some of the Global Hotel Price Changes from 2010 to 2011.

The research revealed that:

• New York was the favourite travel destination for UK travellers in the first six months of the year despite the average hotel price in the city hitting £160, according to the latest Hotels.com Hotel Price Index™ (HPI®).
• The 6% rise followed strong demand from domestic travellers and a surge of overseas visitors cashing in on the appreciation of their currencies against the US Dollar.
• The Big Apple was one of six US cities in the top 20 list with Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orlando and Miami also featuring as the Pound held its own.

I like the design experiment with the Polar Area Diagram (Nightingale Rose Diagram), but the colored sections relating to two different axis are a little hard to understand.  I really like the monument silouettes for each destination.  Very similar to an earlier design InfoNewt did for them about the Hotel Price Index.

The infographic is missing some form of copyright license and the URL to make it easier to find the original infographic.

Thanks to Sarah for sending in the link!

America’s Most Haunted Hotels infographic

I really like Snoozing With Ghosts & Ghouls: A guide to America’s most haunted hotels from TravelPost.com.  It’s light on visualizing data, but I like both the content and the easy-to-read graphic.  The locations are the only thing actually visualized, but they could also have done visuals for the Guest Ratings.

Thanks to Ambika for sending in the link!