This page contains the publishing principles of The Road Trip expert travel blog. Our mission is to help people plan and enjoy incredible road trips, car camping excursions, and travel experiences. We want to provide people with the best possible advice for an adventure on the road. However, The Road Trip Expert is also a business and needs to make money.
Therefore, it’s important to have an editorial policy that, when followed, delivers a sustainable business model without conflicting with our mission. The editorial process was developed by the founder of The Road Trip Expert and it plays a big part in how operations are managed and decisions are made.
Editorial Guidelines of The Road Trip Expert
The 4 pillars of our editorial guidelines are:
- Make the content as useful as possible
- Make the content as accurate as possible
- Be transparent about how we make money
- Ensure the content is monitored and updated to maintain quality
1. Making The Content As Useful As Possible
We aim to create content that helps people. The way we do this is by creating content that is thoroughly researched and draws from the personal experience of our team of travel enthusiasts. We try to think carefully about the needs of our readers and build useful content in a way that helps people with the core challenges this site was built to assist with:
- Planning a road trip
- Going car camping
- Enjoying travel experiences
We believe experience and enthusiasm are important parts of creating useful content. All of the contributors to The Road Trip Expert are travel enthusiasts just like our readers. They are encouraged to draw on their experiences to provide interesting information.
2. Making The Content As Accurate As Possible
All of the content on this website is extensively checked and reviewed before publishing. We fact-check our content and always strive to link to external citations and evidence within our content to provide the reader with the ability to check the information for themselves.
3) Being Transparent About How We Make Money
In our advertising disclosure, we clearly outline how The Road Trip Expert makes money. In the blog posts/articles on this website, we clearly label sponsored content in order to separate it from our own original editorial content. There are also affiliate disclosures throughout this site that aim to ensure our readers understand when we may receive a commission from the purchase of a product or service we have discussed or recommended in our content. Any brands that The Road Trip Expert works with or mentions are thoroughly vetted during the editorial process. We hope that this helps to build trust with our audience.
4) Ensuring The Content Is Updated
We monitor the content and pay specific attention to content that naturally requires updating over time. Although this is challenging, to the best of our ability we try to ensure that the information is up-to-date and accurate. This also includes periodic vetting of brands.
How The Content On The Road Trip Expert Is Created
With the above editorial guidelines in mind, it’s important to explain how the content on this website is created and how we’ve tried to align that process with the principles discussed above and our mission.
In the planning phase, content ideas are conceived with a view to increasing the usefulness of the website. Generally speaking, this involves creating content that helps our audience with one of the core challenges that this site was built to help with:
- Planning a road trip.
- Going on a car camping trip.
- Enjoying travel experiences.
Crucially, this means building clusters of content that are linked together to provide a good experience. We try not to publish lots of loosely connected content that doesn’t align with the stated mission of the website.
The content is written by a human writer who may use a variety of tools and resources to assist them. We will discuss the use of AI/automated technology later. Topics are researched thoroughly and the writers always have real-life experience and expertise on the topic they are writing about. For example, the founder, Iain, has personally taken road trips all over the world over many years. We reference sources of information by linking to them within the content so that readers can check the information for themselves if they wish. We also publish information on all of the authors so that you can understand who created the content and why they are qualified to do so.
Prior to publishing the content is always thoroughly checked and edited by Iain who is the founder. In addition to considering the accuracy of the content, he is also trying to think of ways to make the article more useful.
As stated above, much of the content is monetized. You can read more about this on our Advertising Disclosure page. We always disclose when we are making money from an aspect of the content. Many goods and services exist to solve real-world problems and make things easier. What we try to do is recommend things that we have either used ourselves (with good results) or have thoroughly researched to the point where we are confident that it is benefitting the reader to receive the suggestion of that product or service. Recommending something that is closely related to the topic of an article can benefit the reader.
Updating content is crucial in an ever-changing world. What we try to do is monitor content clusters and update them periodically. This involves reading through the content and updating information as required and also trying to make it better by adding new things.
We do the best we can but of course, this is a challenging task. What we try to do is implement Google’s guidelines for creating helpful content. With that being said, let’s look at the topic of AI/automated technology.
How The Road Trip Expert Uses AI To Help Create Content
Having kept up to date with the capabilities of AI to help in content creation, we feel that it can help create more useful content. Here are a few ways that we think AI is useful for this blog:
- If a human writer wants to include 5 key pieces of information in a paragraph AI can help write this in a more concise way. – This helps readers get more information faster.
- If a human writer has lots of real-life, valuable experience on a topic but is not particularly good at writing in good English (for example English is their second language) then the AI is very good at increasing the readability of a section of writing – This improves content readability, accessibility, and allows readers to benefit from the expertise of the writer.
- AI is good at helping to draw insightful conclusions between multiple pieces of information that would otherwise take a human a lot of time. For example, AI can process the text on a travel insurance policy page and cross-reference it against the most common things which travelers make claims for – This helps writers create more useful content
With the above in mind, The Road Trip Expert will start to utilize this technology in the content creation process. The aim is to leverage the technology in a way that is consistent with the stated editorial guidelines to increase the helpfulness of this website.
An example might be: A writer outlines 5 crucial pieces of information that they wish to be conveyed to a reader within a single paragraph, with a view to giving the reader an accurate answer to their query in the fastest amount of time.
From our testing, we have found AI to be superior to a human writer at this task. Therefore a human writer may use AI to help construct paragraphs to insert into the content.
Content will always be thoroughly checked by a human prior to publishing. We hope that the use of AI will improve the usefulness, readability, and conciseness of our content.
Corrections Policy
As previously discussed, it’s part of our mission to ensure our content is up-to-date and accurate. We will endeavor to correct any errors or misleading information within our content as quickly as possible after it is discovered.
To contact the editorial team regarding an error on this website please email Iain at the following email: [email protected]