Five Magazines Looking for City Guides (Edition II)
Welcome to the Friday Freebie Five, a new weekly feature on Dream of Travel Writing’s Six Figure Travel Writer blog.
Each week, we comb our Travel Magazine Database to bring you five magazine sections open to freelancers around a theme–front-of-book trend pieces, long-form first-person features, short narrative postcards–to inspire your pitches.
Sky (Delta)
“Wheels Up” is broken up into seven to eight smaller sections. One subsection written by a contributor is a 250-word, second-person piece called “Trending” about a popular city to travel to, like Mexico City, Ottawa, or Oakland.
b.inspired (brussels airlines)
“Barrio” is a 400-to-600-word article covering things to do in a particular city. It usually lists seven-to-eight bars, restaurants, museums, and shops including their addresses and websites. They are written in third person. Example destinations from previous issues include Edinburgh, Cotonou, and Barcelona.
Voyeur (Virgin Australia)
“Local’s Guide” is a 500-to-700 word article that falls under the “Travel” section, and profiles a given city around the world. It’s written from the first-person perspective of a local resident—typically, a young professional—and highlights city hotspots, restaurants, nightlife and lodging. Recent “Local’s Guide” articles have profiled the thriving city of Dublin, Ireland (from the perspective of an interior designer), and the Texan creativity capital of Austin (from the perspective of a musician). Text is always accompanied by a sidebar of where to “drink,” “stay,” “eat” and “see,” which lists website and address information of locales.
Southwest: The Magazine
“Your Adventure In” offers travelers suggestions of things to do in a particular region accessible via Southwest Airlines. This section features four sub-categories. “Your Adventure In Pasadena” includes “Family Traveler,” “Shopaholic,” “Culture Hound,” and “Epicurean.” Each sub-category offers one main suggestion detailed in a 100-word paragraph, and three to six side-bar activities with 10-to-20-word descriptions. “Family Traveler” includes “Kidspace Children’s Museum” and “Bengees Ice Cream Crafters.” “Epicurean” includes “Feat on Innovation” and “Congregation Ale House.” “Your Adventure In Sea Pines” and “Your Adventure In The OC” were also recently featured in this section.
The National (Amtrak)
“Next Stop” is a 2,000-to-2,500-word feature expanding on a particular location accessible via Amtrak that retains strong cultural customs and values that ought to be appreciated and preserved. For example, “Next Stop: Detroit – Where Dan Gilbert has jump-started the revival of a once-great and left-for-dead American City,” includes a rendering of Gilbert’s scale model of Detroit and uses 30-to-50-word captions to elaborate on the architecture of six landmark buildings.
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