Posts tagged summer
July Newsletter—#NYCGO Summer Contest
Hello Trazzlers—
It’s been a while… We’ve been busy putting together a big contest for summer—and coming up with a dream job for the winner, who will be Trazzler’s very first “writer-in-residence.”
#NYCGO Summer Writing Contest and ThemeOasis
1. n. a fertile or green area in an arid region (as a desert).
2. n. something that provides refuge, relief, or pleasant contrast.
(Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009.)
Modern life can often feel like a trek through the desert. For this contest, we want you to write about a place that not only satisfies your thirst for a change of scenery, but goes beyond this, breaking the spell of everyday existence and providing the “refuge and relief” that we all crave, especially in the summer. Your oasis might be an urban park, a meal in a restaurant that you’ll replay for years, a swimming hole on a hot summer day, a romantic hideaway that you return to again and again, a museum where you lose yourself for hours… really any place of extreme beauty, culture, flavor, respite, or relaxation. » Read more
We’re Awarding 14 Writing Contracts:
About this contest:
Trazzler is a site for dreamers, so when we wanted to find a dream assignment for our first two-week travel writer-in-residence, we knew it had to be New York City. For generations, writers from around the world have flocked to New York to drink from the fountain of inspiration—where better to write a series of trips with the theme “oasis?”
Our summer contest is going to be bit different from our past contests. For one thing, it’s bigger, a lot bigger: 
New York City’s official marketing, tourism and partnership organization—has generously sponsored the grand prize: a $10,000 contract to write 30 Trazzler trips.
Our grand prize winner will stay in the heart of New York City’s own urban oasis, in the lap of luxury at the AKA luxury hotel residences one block off 5th Avenue and Central Park with swanky in-suite spa services.
The flight will be provided by JetBlue. JetBlue offers flights to more than 50 destinations, with free TV, snacks, award winning service, and the most legroom in coach.
» See rules and more contest information
May Contest Winners—Work of Art
Prizes awarded: Ten $250 contracts to write 10 trips
Kendra Hoover, Julie Hammonds, David Chachere, Kimberly Wadsworth, Anne-Sophie Redisch, Sami Esfahani, Hrvoje Karalic, Gladys Glover, Yoshi Salaverry, and Beth Green.
We also awarded 22 freelance contracts. You can read about them in the blog entry below this one.
Welcome Twitterers
Thanks for following—today we topped 760,000 followers. You
can always contact us with feedback and questions @trazzler. You can also now send a tweet about any trip by clicking the “share” button on the trip page. During Round Two of our contest, sending tweets about your favorite contest entries can help them win.
Don’t Stay Home!
I’m in Mexico at the moment and, like so many places weathering the past year’s economic downturn, the little guys here need your business. Whether you can swing a big adventure or want to explore your own corner of the world more, this is a great time to seek out travel deals and help others keep their businesses afloat.
Happy Trazzling…
Megan Cytron
Executive Editor
http://www.trazzler.com
P.S. If you have any questions or feedback, you can find us @trazzler on Twitter or on Get Satisfaction.
Write for Trazzler
If you are reading this blog, then you must be wondering why anyone would be crazy enough to launch a travel site start-up at the tail end of the summer of the staycation (how I loathe this term!). I don’t know about you, but personally I need the escape of travel more than ever before. I love my day-to-day life, but it’s intense and it’s easy to forget that the rest of the world really exists outside of the self-absorbed confines of Madrid.
As I write this, I’m sitting in a little house in “el pueblo más raro de Andalucía” (Andalusia’s weirdest town, as our friend who loaned us his apartment calls it). This place has zero tourist interest. When I plugged my laptop into a Franco-era outlet, my power cord caught on fire. Wifi? You’ve got to be kidding. Every evening families leave their front doors open and eat dinner. When you walk down the street, you can’t help but be a voyeur—it’s like peering into dozens of living dollhouses. When we went to the local public pool the kids flocked around us as if we were endangered animals in a zoo (my paleness is pretty freakish here). Every day, we drive through the dusty hills dotted with toros bravos to the windy, nearly abandoned beaches, look across at the dark mountains of Morocco, check out Roman ruins and white medieval towns perched on hills, eat sea anemones and reproductive organs from tuna from the Strait of Gibraltar. For a lot of people, this would be the vacation from hell and for us it’s the best one ever.
And, for me, that’s what Trazzler is about. So many other travel sites are essentially reference books with logistical information, tourist bureau propaganda, or an unedited, overwhelming morass of useful and useless information. Guidebooks rely on just a handful of undercompensated writers to do it all. When I started writing for Trazzler, I quickly realized that it was completely different from any other assignment. Here, a writer creates his or her own beat. There’s no pressure to write about places you don’t know or care anything about. No need to create trips that appeal to everyone. Here you’ll find what slips through the cracks everywhere else—those secret places that you might only tell your friends about… those defining travel moments that reside in your memory long after you have returned home.
What we want to do is create a world of travel possibilities. Each Trazzler Trip transports you to a very specific place and moment. Real human beings are behind each and every trip, carefully choosing the photo, writing the copy, and editing it. You decide what appeals to you and what doesn’t. Trazzler is a savvy friend who will get to know your Travel Personality over time. You can use it as “virtual teleportation” (as Biz Stone imagined when the idea was hatched), travel therapy, a game, an escapist fantasy, or—we also hope—as a tool to learn about new ways to travel to one-of-a-kind spots and an outlet for your travel ruminations.
More later, but I just wanted to give a shout-out to the smart and creative people behind this site. I worked with Adam Rugel over twelve years ago at AOL, writing ad copy for everything from frozen steaks to the Weekly World News. He moved onward and upward to specialize in online travel sites (and I took the escape route into the world of freelance writing, design, and perpetual studentdom). Trazzler is the culmination of many years of experience, experimentation, inspiration, planning, and dreaming. It’s not going to be anything like anything else out there. And it’s just going to get better.
So sign up and take this crazy journey with us, then take a crack at writing your own trips. But, be warned, if you are really astute and analytical, we’ll rope you into helping us—we’re wily that way. Let us know what you think.
—Megan Cytron
