Winners of the Travel Rants consumer awards

Winners of the Travel Rants consumer awards

By Darren Cronian on Monday, December 8th, 2008

The Travel Rants consumer awards has come to an end and what a fantastic response it received. It was great to see the nominees get their communities and readers involved and loads of people talking about Travel Rants on the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

It was far more fun watching people vote for their favourites rather than just writing a number of posts mentioning my favourite travel websites and blogs of the year. In total they were 3,188 votes cast and here are the winners:

Best travel blog

Traveling Mamas

Best corporate travel blog

Best trip planning site

Best for travel content

Matador Network

Best designed travel website

Best travel comparison site

Best online travel tool

Best travel forum

Best site for holiday and hotel reviews

Best newspaper travel portal

Congratulations to the winners, and the runners-up.

I would like to make a call for more blog awards, there really isn’t a great amount of recognition for the excellent content being written by travel bloggers. I would like to see the likes of the Travvies, which seems to have died, re-emerge.

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20 responses to “Winners of the Travel Rants consumer awards”

Dave | 8 December, 2008 at 9:13 am

I missed out on being able to vote this year but signed up to the RSS so hopefully next time around I won’t miss out on voting for some of my favorite sites.

Good work, and keep up the good work

Karen Bryan | 8 December, 2008 at 9:41 am

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to you Darren for organising the awards.

Sam Daams | 8 December, 2008 at 10:20 am

Hey Darren,

Congrats on the great response you got. Like you said, it was a fun award and therefore fun to see people get really involved on twitter and the like pushing their sites. It’s cool/funny when a site like Matador beats out Lonely Planet in terms of ‘best travel content’. That’s also why I have absolutely no problem losing out to Tripadvisor and Tripadvisor (Seatguru)

Maybe travelblogs.com should write out a new travel blog award?!

Cheers,

Sam

Europe a la Carte - Trackback | 8 December, 2008 at 10:29 am

[...] my blog, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Here are the winners of the Travel Rants Consumer Awards. Congratulations to all the winners and especially to Trip Advisor which won in two categories, [...]

Jeremy Head | 8 December, 2008 at 2:05 pm

Hi Darren
Bit surprised at the winner of Best Travel Blog – it’s a US site. Does that mean you get a lot of US based readers?
Jeremy

Pete Meyers | 8 December, 2008 at 2:50 pm

Thanks for putting this together, Darren!

It was a lot of fun and a helpful way to learn about several great sites we didn’t previously know. Maybe TR could take the lead organizing a Travvies-type event that we could all help promote?

Tom and Pete Meyers

Darren Cronian | 8 December, 2008 at 3:51 pm

@ Jeremy,

There weren’t many UK nominations because there aren’t many UK travel blogs. In fact Karen was the only UK consumer related blog I felt was worth mentioning, that. I found a few blogs from the BlogCamp like Heather’s, Caitlin’s and a few others, but I haven’t read them enough to justify mentioning them on the nominations this year.

Unfortunately, You would struggle to count the number of blogs with the fingers on both hands consumer related within the UK.

As for the votes, it depends on how well they promoted their nominations, the likes of Lonely Planet, mentioned the awards on their blog and forum, so would get a lot of votes. In the end it’s just a little bit of fun.

Darren Cronian | 8 December, 2008 at 3:53 pm

@ Peter

It takes a lot of time organising a little online vote like this, but in return you get a lot of new readers, a lot of people talking about your blog online, and a lot of links, so it has it’s advantages for sure. We’ll see.

Darren Cronian | 8 December, 2008 at 3:54 pm

@ Jeremy,

To add; I am starting to see an increase in US visitors, primarily due to Twitter, but the majority are still from the UK and Europe.

Shannon | 8 December, 2008 at 3:59 pm

Darren – Thanks for having this fun contest. You made us giggle like little girls by listing Traveling Mamas as a nominee. There are so many fantastic blogs out there in the travel community and if any of them should win any title, it should be Travel-Rants. You are 2 cool and awesome.

Big props to Europ a la Carte, Tripso, and Soultraveler3 for providing wonderful blogs for readers. The travel blogging community rocks!

Karen Bryan | 8 December, 2008 at 4:06 pm

Jeremy, I did notice quite a bias toward US travel content sites in the Awards.

Darren Cronian | 8 December, 2008 at 5:28 pm

@ Karen

Apart from yours, where else is their UK travel content? Okay, World Reviewer, but that’s another site I have only really started to look at since the BlogCamp. These sites were chosen because I have found them useful in the last 12 months, maybe if I do something like this next year, I will open up nominations, we’ll see.

Erica | 8 December, 2008 at 8:52 pm

Congrats to all the winners. I must say I really like Lonely Planet’s new design. The look and layout of Mr & Mrs Smith is much better though!

Kara | 9 December, 2008 at 2:55 am

Thanks, Darren, for the props!

Kara/MountainMama

Soultravelers3 | 9 December, 2008 at 6:54 pm

Thanks Darren for this fun awards contest! So glad it brought you a lot of traffic and I am happy with the great interest that it brought to the travel community. We now have some new readers who said they found me here!

As the only single writer and full time traveler nominated, we were amazed by our nomination and how well we did by coming in second. It was quite a horse race! We are really grateful to our devoted readers and the kind things people said in the comments here, on our blog and twitter. I was touched and astonished by what some of our regular readers did to support us.

As you know, it is a lot of work to keep up a travel blog, so it was really encouraging to get the acknowledgment and feel all the passion for travel! Congrats to all the winners and all the people who participated!

Thanks for stirring things up and adding a little bit of fun for all!

VenessaP | 9 December, 2008 at 10:53 pm

Hi Darren,

Thanks for putting it all together, and for the shout out to our Thorn Tree

~ Venessa
Communities Product Manager, Lonely Planet

Matthew Cashmore | 17 December, 2008 at 10:43 pm

Darren – as ever mate a totally cool poll – you’re quite right though… where are the Travel Bloggers Awards? So if you don’t mind a bit of blatant plugging – and given you’re part of the reason I’ve decided to do this….

May I announce the first ever Lonely Planet Travel Bloggers Awards – http://lplabs.com/2008/12/16/the-lonely-planet-2009-travel-bloggers-awards/

Matthew,
Innovation Ecosystems Manager, Lonely Planet

Darren Cronian | 17 December, 2008 at 11:13 pm

@ Matthew,

I wouldn’t allow such a blantant plug, but since it’s good news, I will let this one pass

Matthew Cashmore | 17 December, 2008 at 11:14 pm

thank you

Venessa Paech | 17 December, 2008 at 11:18 pm

Huzzah Darren! We’re stoked about the awards.

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