About Emma Field
Hi, hello, hey. I’m Emma Field*
I specialise in managing and creating travel content and copy for the tourism industry and have worked with brands including VisitBritain, VisitEngland, Rough Guides, Google and Gateway Gatwick.
Most of my experience lies in UK travel, which I love, but I’ve also written optimised website copy for Spanish hotels, commissioned and edited city, country and port guides for destinations around the globe and penned a feature about Colombia for a Canadian newspaper.
Wide-ranging experience in the travel industry
Fifteen years ago, I figured out how to combine my love of travel with my love of writing and stories and get paid for it. I gained an NCTJ qualification and started a career creating content for travellers and the travel industry.
At Columbus Travel Media, I worked my way up from editorial assistant to acting head of editorial. Since then, I’ve worked as commissioning editor for Frommer’s Unlimited and editor for VisitEngland, where I managed copy, imagery and video. In between, I snuck in a few long-term stints of overland travel.
Since going freelance in 2014, I’ve worked on travel content and copywriting for VisitBritain, English Tourism Week, Google, The Good Hotel Guide, Rough Guides, TravelSupermarket, The Access Group and several UK destination management organisations. My travel writing has appeared in Wired for Adventure, Countryfile, Metro, Outdoor Swimming Society, Toronto Star and Quality Edge.
Variety and people, please
Despite being an introvert, I love interviewing people. I regularly interview well-known adventure travellers and people in the tourism industry. I also get to chat with female travellers and travel experts on Facebook Live through a Lockdown Travel Chat series. I’m not ready to share those here yet (because, introvert), but it brings me nicely to another aspect of travel content creation I love: experimenting with different content types.
As part of my work with English Tourism Week 2018 and 2019, I worked with dozens of DMOs and IGERs groups to coordinate dozens of Instameets. The success of the campaign speaks for itself (it reached over 2.1m people and generated over 200,000 likes and 7,000 comments) but it was the process of putting together the itineraries and working with dozens of people who love what they do that sticks with me.
In 2020, I started working more directly with the UK travel industry, writing a series of toolkits for tourism SMEs, whitepapers and B2B blog posts. Talking to people who live, work and breathe tourism on a daily basis is fascinating; their resilience during the global pandemic is inspiring.
Right now, I’m keen to explore podcasts. I’ve started writing audio descriptions for the National Trust in an effort to learn more about this effective and versatile format.
Detail orientated
I particularly enjoy writing about history, adventure, family, sustainable and literary-themed travel, but am willing to turn my hand to pretty much anything. I’m also reliable and I pride myself on meeting deadlines.
I’m a stickler for punctuation and grammar. But not in an old-school, never-start-a-sentence-with-a-conjunction sort of way. I know the rules and take pleasure in breaking them when it feels right.
Also me
I live in West Kent (but my soul belongs by the water). I’m also a parent, wild swimmer and unable to control myself around chips (the kind you eat out of paper with lashings of vinegar and tomato ketchup, preferably by the sea).
I studied for my degree in English Literature in Wales and Scotland and for my NCTJ in Magazine Journalism in Brighton.
Keen to know more about the highs (and lows) of my career and life, you weirdo? (I love weirdos.) Check out my LinkedIn profile, Portfolio and Have Kids Will Travel family travel project.
*Annoyingly, there’s a popular flight simulator called Emma Field so I’ve decided not to battle with that for the SERPs rankings. Instead, I’ve gone with Fast-Field, my children’s surname.
