Stoke Travel’s Content and Travel Writing Internships: Some Details

Stokepedia

Hey, thanks a lot for showing your interest, it’s nice to see people take a shot at something according to their passions. Working for Stoke Travel, and writing travel related content in general, isn’t going to make any of us a million bucks, but it will relentlessly take us out of our comfort zones, deliver us to fantastical situations and repeatedly provide the times of our lives. The experiences gathered and the skills learned will be called upon regularly throughout your lives and career paths – whether they feature content creation, or travel writing, or not.

The Internship

You can start whenever you like and intern for as long as you like, though we do prefer a three-month minimum. We are very flexible with hours, days off, etc, but generally ask interns to be in our Barcelona office from 11am until 6pm. You will be working with the content team, in an office that can have up to 50 full-time staff and interns working on any given day. You will be working with our content manager on a number of different projects for both our own content portals and for third-party agents at the marketing department’s request.

At Stoke we create content that ranges from straightforward travel narratives, to informative articles regarding the trips we do, honest accounts of the travelling/backpacking/study abroad lifestyle, listicles, SEO content, interviews and vox pop, guidebooks, web pages and personal blog entries. Our tone is irreverent, humorous and well-informed; as a medium-sized brand we aren’t restricted in our content – we can be crass, vulgar, rude, so long as it’s honest and inoffensive. It’s as if Contiki downsized and took on a content strategy that was part Lonely Planet and part Vice, when both were still cool, obviously.

We will be relying on, and fostering, your ideas for content. We don’t want to sit you down and have you robotically typing the words that we want to see, we want to encourage your creativity and see your voice sing across our platforms. We will regularly hold brainstorming sessions where we throw around article ideas relating to our content needs and your mentor will identify those with the most promise. Then we expand on those ideas and you turn them into published articles, once they’ve passed by the editor’s red pen.

At the start of the internship we will help you to set up your own blog. Maintaining the blog will be a regular part of your time with us, and your way to get paid. We will create the blog in a way that is true to you and your experiences so the entries come easily and honestly, then we will promote your blog posts to Stoke Travel’s large social media audience. You will be give a unique promo code and special deals to offer to your audience, and you will receive a commision every time somebody takes advantage of your offer. This is more of a way to make pocket money, than to pay off a mortgage, and your success is dictated by how readily the audience takes to your content.

Throughout this internship we’ll be asking you to produce at least one piece of content per day. This level of output should well prepare you for any career in commercial content creation. We will give you a schedule that includes posts for Stokepedia (our content portal) and your blog (where you can promote products with your promo code). We envisage that over a five-day split you would be producing three articles for Stoke and two for your blog (once these targets are met you can post to your blog as often as you like, the idea being that you develop a following outside of the Stoke Travel network).

The internship will require you to spend at least one day a week out in Barcelona exploring the city, its people, and contributing to our online guidebook project. On weekends the staff organise daytrips in the immediate area, and there is opportunity to travel with Stoke to our destinations when there are trips on. Through our Barcelona partners we offer party nights almost every night, plenty of local activities and a lot of opportunity for group drinks and dinners.

We will provide you with shared accommodation in our often-crazy staff house. Everyone who works for Stoke is honest and diligent and diligently and honestly apply themselves to partying whenever they can. This is a place to get to know new people, an exciting city, and to get out of your comfort zone, not a place to grow daisies and raise a family. Our staff all work office hours and so the parties usually don’t go all night. Usually.

Your mentors

The Stoke Team is young, creativity and always up for a challenge. We like to look forward with our content and will constantly be relying on your knowledge to augment our own. You’ll be working not only with the content team, but with marketing, media and the directors.

The content team is headed by Gravy, a 12-year veteran of Stoke Travel. During his tenure with Stoke Travel Gravy has taken hiatuses to improve his skill-set and experience in content creation, journalism and writing, taking the editor’s role at Surfing Life magazine for a spell, as well as acting as a mentor on the Global Hobo writing workshops. Gravy has had work published across a number of titles, platforms and genres and uses his experience to help drive and manage Stoke Travel’s content output.

Stoke also has a dedicated media wing that produces all kinds of video content to promote our products, as well as travel documentaries and just about anything really. Check out our 50 Fiestas project on Facebook to see the kind of thing we’re producing. We also provide copywriting, content, social media and basic web services to other brands as a content agency, something that you will also be able to contribute to if you take up the internship.

If you’re still interested then please contact gravy@stoketravel.com to let him know you’re keen, and while you’re there you can ask any specific questions that you may still have.