Types of Travel Guide #5: Event Specific Travel Guide

All about The Event Specific Travel Guide

In this article we’re going to look at the definition of an Event Specific travel guide, and look at examples of published guides available.

Definition of an Event Specific Travel Guide

Event-specific travel guides are a sub-genre of the destination guide but focus on a specific event or a series of events. There are many international events that draw large crowds, for example, Germany’s Oktoberfest; New Orleans Mardi Gras; England’s Glastonbury; Brazil’s Rio Carnival; and Mexico’s Day of the Dead.

Based on your target audience you can write about an event from a different perspective and bring something new a broadly covered topic.

Here’s a couple of examples of Event Specific Travel Guides from Amazon:

Professor Norman Ratcliffe’s experience in biomedicine and working with tropical diseases made him an ideal candidate to write Guide to Rio Olympics 2016: Tips for Staying Safe and Healthy for the Olympics, New Year and Carnival. Norman’s guide is not only relevant for the Olympics, but also to the millions of visitors for the New Year, Rock in Rio, and the legendary Rio Carnival.

This type of writing is particularly time-dependent, as you need to schedule your publication well before the actual event to take account of the long planning lead time of the travelers attending it. You also need to make sure you allow enough time to promote and market your book.

Andrew Hardcastle compiled the most bizarre, shocking, and fun festivals around the world into his A Year Of Bucket List Festivals: From St Patrick’s Day to Glastonbury and Oktoberfest back around to New Year’s Eve. It includes all the key dates as well as how to get to the destination, and what to expect when you get there.

Event-specific travel guides that list many events require extensive research, and this can be challenging when you’re working too far into the future.

Personal anecdotes individualize event-specific guides, and Peter N. Milligan’s Bulls Before Breakfast: Running with the Bulls and Celebrating Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain is part memoir and part travel guide. It recounts Peter’s adventures in Pamplona where he’s run with the bulls over 70 times.

As well as including all the necessary event information, you can list recommendations about local accommodation, places to eat and drink and additional flavor about the nearby neighborhood. You could also include tips on the best locations or the best time of day to take photographs, or interviews with people who have attended previous events, or even the event organizers.

Considerations When Planning an Event Specific Travel Guide

Take a moment to assess your long-term strategy to determine how frequently it needs updating. Rather than planning a year-specific guide that will be out of date as soon as the event date has passed, you could look at writing a generic guide for the event that could be reused for subsequent years, or else you will need to publish an updated version of the guide each year.

Want to learn about the other types of travel guides? Here’s the full list of this article series:

In addition to these articles, I also wrote the following articles about writing a Local Travel Guide (which is a sub-genre of special interest travel guides):

Want to know more about the Event Specific #travelguide niche? Here's some tips when you're planning and writing your book. #amwriting Click To Tweet

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1 thought on “Types of Travel Guide #5: Event Specific Travel Guide”

God I feel so inspired by this article. There’s all sorts of events I travel to that would make a good travel guide. Never thought of writing one before. Your Ace for getting my mind whirring on this topic…