Interviews
Lara and Terence are available to do interviews about Grantourismo and their grand tours; the history and concept of the Grand Tour as a form of travel; slow and sustainable travel; local travel and the idea of ‘living like locals’; experiential travel, educational travel and learning holidays; the notion of ‘giving back’ when travelling, charitable deeds and voluntourism; the destinations they travel to and experiences in those destinations; holiday rentals and the idea of settling in; and a whole range of other related topics. Email Lara to arrange an interview in person or by phone, email, online chat, or Twitter.
Media Coverage, Guest Posts and Q&As
Stories & Columns
As widely published travel writers, Lara and Terence can write feature stories and columns, review properties, and interview subjects on topics related to the interests of this site (as described above), for magazines, newspapers and websites. They are happy to provide clippings of recently published print stories and links to published work, and to discuss angles and ideas with editors.
Guest Blog Posts & Q&As
Lara and Terence would love to participate in Q&As for your blog or write guest posts when their travel schedule permits. Email Lara to discuss your ideas.
Editorial Policy
Lara and Terence have complete editorial control over the content they produce that appears on Grantourismo, even when they work with travel partners. They write honestly and critically. You can be confident that Lara and Terence apply the same critical skills of evaluation to any destination, experience or property they are writing about, partner or no partner. They will always maintain the same ‘tell it like it is’ attitude and opinionated writing style they’ve had throughout their careers as travel writers.
Information
Grantourismo is described on the Projects page of this site, however, if you have any questions or need more information, don’t hesitate to ask. From time to time media releases about projects may be placed on this page. Grantourismo partners, such as HomeAwayUK, will also have media releases; HomeAwayUK’s, for instance, can be found at their Press Centre. You can learn more about Lara and Terence on this site, download their published articles at Lara’s Media Bistro page, see Terence’s work on his photography site, or read their reflections about their work as travel writers on their personal blogs Cool Travel Guide (Lara’s) and Wide Angles, Wine and Wanderlust (Terry’s). You can find them on Twitter at twitter.com/gran_tourismo, twitter.com/laradunston and twitter.com/terencecarter. Lara has a LinkedIn page.
Images
Terence is a professional photographer and can make images available to the media for the purposes of promoting Grantourismo. For other purposes, some of the images on this site may be available for sale; contact Terence to discuss purchase of images: info@loneproductions.com. Photos of the HomeAwayUK properties that Lara and Terence stayed at during their 2010 Grand Tour project with HomeAwayUK are available at HomeAwayUK’s Flickr page. Lara and Terence don’t have many pretty pictures of themselves yet, but they’re working on it; ask and they’ll see what they can do.
Competitions
From March 2010 to February 2011, Lara and Terence held monthly travel writing and photography competitions on Grantourismo in partnership with HomeAwayUK, who, along with RailEurope, Viator, Context, Our Explorer, AFAR, Trourist, and Putumayo contributed prizes totalling £18,000. The aim of the competition was to inspire, encourage and promote quality travel writing and photography, and to recruit writers, bloggers and photographers to help spread messages about local travel, slow and sustainable travel, and experiential travel.
To participate in the competitions, entrants had to subscribe to the site by email/RSS, follow on Twitter and Facebook, post their stories and photos on their own blogs, and link to Grantourismo and the main competition partner, to be in the running for holiday rental stays, rail tickets, tours, use of private guides, magazine subscriptions, travel journals, and CDs. Lara and Terence promoted the competition and sponsors on social media for the duration of the contest, and it was covered by other travel sites and blogs, attracting a lot of attention and participation.
For the month of July, Lara and Terence held a Grand Tour competition with Luxe Guides. Entrants had to create 5-stop itineraries of their dream trips, featuring Luxe Guides destinations, and submit them to the competition posts on this site. Luxe Guides donated weekly prizes of lavish Grand Tour boxed sets of guides.
Lara and Terence plan to continue to host competitions on Grantourismo. If you see yourself as a potential competition partner and would like to suggest a contest idea and donate prizes, do contact us. If you are journalist or blogger and want to know more about these, please email Lara.
Festivals, Events, Activities, Courses & Other Stuff
Lara and Terence are always looking for interesting things to do and learn, from lessons in language basics to learning how to cook local recipes to going on walking tours to attending local festivals and events. If you have any ideas, suggestions or recommendations in relation to courses, tours, activities, festivals, and events that you’d like us to do/review and write about in your publication or site, do drop us a line.
Partnerships & Sponsorship
Lara and Terence are open to considering relevant partnership and sponsorship proposals. They must have some connection to our interests as described in the first paragraph above under Interviews. If you’d like to partner up or be a sponsor, do get in touch to discuss your ideas.
Contact details
To arrange interviews, stories and blog content, get hold of photos or video, get more information about our projects, or become a sponsor/partner, contact Lara and Terence:
Lara Dunston & Terence Carter
+61 8 7798 6864 (Australian mobile)
+971 50 720 8690 (Dubai mobile)
laradunston@mac.com
www.grantourismotravels.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/gran_tourismo
Skype: laradunston
Hotmail/Messenger: grantourismo@live.com
MEDIA RELEASES
MEDIA RELEASE #2 issued by HomeAwayUK
The end of a Grand Tour and a first of its kind partnership in travel
Thursday, 07 April 2010
This month sees the end of a first of its kind partnership between a travel company and travel writers, which succeeded in creating hot debate among the travel writing community and redefining a new way for travel companies and writers to work together. ‘Grantourismo’, a year-long partnership between writer-photographer team Lara Dunston and Terence Carter and holiday rentals website HomeAway.co.uk, closed with the final allocation of prizes to the winners of the twelfth travel writing contest held on the blog over the last year.
Grantourismo was a yearlong travel experiment aimed at exploring more enriching and meaningful ways of travelling and showing how staying in holiday rentals instead of hotels can facilitate this. Lara and Terence had around two weeks in each ‘home’ they stayed in, enabling them to slow down and travel more sustainably, gain a deeper insight in to the local culture and life (food and cooking being a key theme!), learn and do things and, where possible, give something back to the places they visited.
The Grantourismo blog launched on 1st January 2010 and the couple set off from London in February, following a launch party with canapés and cocktails at their home for that week, a chic penthouse apartment in trendy Battersea. Over the course of the next 12 months the couple visited 34 destinations and travelled 88,417km (54,940 miles) by plane, train, bus, boat and car. They also clocked up 499 blog posts totalling 424,150 words, Terence took some 57,000 photographs and the blog received 70,737 comments.
Lara and Terence stayed in 36 different holiday homes from HomeAway.co.uk, which lists over 200,000 properties worldwide, including a Moroccan Riad, a hut in Kenya, a Grand Canal palazzo in Venice, a conical trullo in Puglia, a Mexican casita, stunning architecturally designed homes and 21 different city apartments.
The couple’s inspiring blog posts, ranging from evocative narratives about their cultural experiences, to practical guides and mouth-watering recipes for local dishes were read by people from 184 countries around the world. Their 3,800+ followers interacted daily with them on Twitter and the blog’s current Alexa ranking is 108,007 globally and 68,989 in the UK, impressive for a site started just over a year ago.
Lara comments, “After a year living in homes around the world, most of them in everyday neighbourhoods, I think we’re going to find it hard to return to hotels. We’ve not only loved having the space, flexibility and privacy a holiday rental offers, but most of all we’ve loved the opportunities it gave us to engage with locals and learn how they live their lives. For us, that’s a far more satisfying way to travel. The trip was transformational.”
Tim Boughton, GM for HomeAway.co.uk said, “The great content Lara and Terence produced for Grantourismo truly showcases the different type of holiday you can enjoy in a real home and provides a fantastic source of inspiration for travellers looking for a more authentic way to travel.”
“Grantourismo essentially gave us two global ambassadors for our service and the travel experience rentals offer, who promoted it every day, online, in social media, and, most importantly, in person to the countless travellers they met along the way. We were delighted with the performance of the blog, but these benefits were immeasurable.”
ENDS - High resolution photos of the holiday homes and destinations featured on Grantourismo are available on request.
MEDIA CONTACT
Sarah Chambers
, PR Manager, HomeAway.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8846 3430
Email: schambers@homeaway.co.uk Twitter: www.twitter.com/HomeAwayUK Skype: sarah_chambers
MEDIA RELEASE #1 issued by HomeAwayUK
In 2010, discover a new way to travel; discover Grantourismo
London, 4th January 2010
HomeAway Holiday-Rentals partners with writers Lara Dunston & Terence Carter to show travellers a more authentic, enriching way to travel
In 2010, globetrotting travel writers Terence Carter and Lara Dunston, in partnership with HomeAway Holiday-Rentals, will swap hotel rooms for holiday homes and embark on a contemporary grand tour of sorts they’re calling Grantourismo. The aim is to slow down, learn and do things, live like locals, and give something back to the places they visit, as they search for a more authentic and enriching way to travel.
Not only will Lara and Terence be chronicling their experiences via a dedicated blog and Twitter page that travellers can interact with (see www.grantourismotravels.com andhttp://twitter.com/gran_tourismo), they will also be available to produce independent articles as they go. Get in touch and read on to find out more.
A huge number of Brits already favour holiday homes over hotels, enjoying the space, privacy, flexibility and authenticity they provide. According to industry analyst Mintel, around one in five people currently holiday in this way and self-catering holidays are rising every year. In 2009, self-catering holidays were forecast to represent over 60% of all overseas holidays and Mintel expects the self catering market to continue to outstrip general holiday growth and exceed 34.3 million breaks by 2011.*
Thanks to the millions of people who own holiday homes worldwide, the choice of rentals is huge, with over 425,000 properties available on the HomeAway sites alone. With this choice, HomeAway rivals the largest hotel chains in the world. The InterContinental Hotel Group, for instance, recently ranked as the worlds largest, with 619,851 rooms. Whatever type of holiday you’re looking for, and whatever type of accommodation, there’s a holiday home to suit.
With Grantourismo, Lara, Terence and HomeAway Holiday-Rentals aim to show how holiday homes provide the perfect solution to today’s travellers’ desires, and the perfect alternative to hotel rooms and resorts. Travellers today are no longer just after a ‘holiday’ of sun, sea and sand, but rather a ‘journey’ where they learn about the local culture, arts, language and people of the places they travel too. A holiday rental is the natural choice for such a trip.
For Lara and Terence, the idea of a ‘grand tour’, a slow, extended journey where they would immerse themselves in the destination had always been appealing. Having already been on the road for over three years, they have called hundreds of hotel rooms ‘home’. But while they have much appreciation for hotels, at every possibility they were quick to trade their swipe cards for door keys and check in to a real ‘home’, albeit a rented one, for a change.
Lara comments, “The contrast between hotels and holiday rentals couldn’t be greater – the chance to really slow down, relax, and take it easy at a holiday rental being the obvious one. There are no breakfast buffet times to wake for, no cocktails to scramble to, and no need to worry about when the kitchen closes. Plus by travelling more slowly, people are also travelling more sustainably – from taking the time to discover local markets and small neighbourhood businesses, to buying and eating local produce instead of expensive imported products. Not only is this kind of travel more sustainable, travellers are also able to learn how to live like locals; which is one of our key aims on this trip.”
Courtney Wylie, General Manager for HomeAway Holiday-Rentals comments, “Here at HomeAway Holiday-Rentals we have stayed in an impressive number of properties between us, discovering for ourselves the benefits of staying in a private home instead of a hotel. Therefore, in 2010 it is our mission, along with Lara and Terry, to help more people discover this unique and liberating way of travelling. Although many people have been holidaying in rentals for years, many are still to try it and yet it caters so well for the millions of travellers today who are looking for a more experiential, more involving holiday, not to mention better value for money.”
Throughout their trip, travellers will be able to interact with Lara and Terence and share their experiences via the Grantourismo blog and Twitter page, as well as on www.HomeAway.co.uk and the company’s Twitter, Flickr and Facebook pages.
To learn more about how you can get involved, if you are interested in interviewing, commissioning or featuring articles from Lara and Terry, please get in touch.
- ENDS -
* Source of statistics: Mintel Self Catering Holiday Report 2007 and 2009
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