Bring your readers along for the journey.

Our world is rife with wonder — from alpine lakes and cloud forests to ancient cobblestoned cities. At Shorthand we believe that every awe-inspiring destination deserves a story that does justice to its unique history and culture.
When it comes to travel, there seem to be endless storytelling opportunities — and decisions. Choosing where to begin with such a broad, multifaceted topic can be intimidating. Perhaps you want to recount an incredible trip, highlight a new locale to curious wayfarers, or simply offer travel guidance. Maybe you want to do a bit of everything! Shorthand makes it easy to bring readers along for the journey, whatever it may be.
Here are six ideas to help you create beautiful, interactive travel stories using Shorthand. Whether you’re a travel writer or publisher, destination marketer, or freelance travel blogger, we’ve got plenty of inspiration to get you started.
1. Zoom in
Inspire readers and move them to action by exploring a location’s unique history and culture. By focusing on just one place, your readers get the chance to experience it deeply through your words and imagery.
Intrepid Travel’s Shorthand story Welcome to Olkola Country is simple, yet effective. The highlight of the story is its elegant writing — a blend of reporting and personal narrative that explores the history, culture, and ecology of an ancestral land of the Olkola people in Australia. The story is elevated with thoughtful photos and videos, and ends with a call to action for the newly-inspired reader.

2. Time travel
Taking readers back through historical moments is a great way to achieve more depth in your stories.
In the story The Museum of Atari, Mario and Electronic Childhood Dreams, Channel News Asia uses Shorthand to create a stunning visual story about a little-known museum of retro video games in Singapore. The highlight of the story is a fun, interactive timeline about the history of video games, which is created using the Shorthand Reveal feature and animates a pixel character as the reader scrolls.

(Find out more about Shorthand’s Reveal section in our Craft post.)
3. Immerse your reader
When words and photos simply aren’t enough to convey the complexity of a travel story, add another layer of reader engagement using various forms of media.
The Sydney Opera House story A Guide to Dance Rites uses multimedia to bring indigenous culture to life. With elements like animation, slideshows, and embedded audio clips, readers can feel fully immersed in one of Australia’s most traditional dance competitions.

With Shorthand, remember that you always have the option to add custom HTML to add further customisations to your stories. See a list of our recommended third party tools in this support document.
4. Just the highlights
Not every trip allows for the luxury of time. In order to get the point across, sometimes a quick and to-the-point listicle is all that’s necessary to deliver a clear and time-efficient message.
Mansion Global’s story 6 Cities, 6 Continents takes a quick jaunt around the world to some of the best cities to buy a dream vacation home. The destinations are all tied together by an interactive map that tracks a route between the cities — a creative use of the Shorthand Reveal section.

5. Keep it practical
Travel stories don’t always need to inspire wanderlust or transport readers to far-flung destinations. Some of the most effective and important travel stories simply provide practical advice — whether that’s how to exchange currency, say “thank you” in a foreign language, or avoid danger.
Travel Weekly’s story Traveling While Female explores how female travelers can stay safe, and uses data to stress the importance of improving women’s safety abroad. By displaying the data as interactive graphics, Travel Weekly draws extra emphasis to key statistics.

6. Zoom out
When you’ve written a couple of beautiful travel stories, what’s next?
Tie together your creative vision by consolidating your stories into a single landing page. You can use Shorthand to create a home for all of your stories, whether that’s by using our Collection section or by including links in other section types.
For example, Luxury Travel nests all of their feature content within a Shorthand story. The page takes advantage of our media-rich sections to create a scrolling archive of their beautiful travel stories.

There are myriad ways to turn a Shorthand story into a landing page. Here’s another example from Perth Now, which takes a simple, colourful approach.

Creating a unique online travel story can seem like a daunting task, but Shorthand’s many easy-to-use features exist to help make your stories exceptional. There are thousands of destinations waiting to be written about, and we can’t wait to see where your stories take us next.
For more inspiration, visit our Pinterest page.
Want to tell your next travel story with Shorthand? Get in touch today!
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This story was originally published on Shorthand.com.
