If you’re about to travel, or would like to start your blog with your next trip, take a look at some of the websites that let you keep a travel blog for free. Let’s check them out:

TravelPod: one of the oldest communities. Not only can we publish texts, but we can also add pictures; create maps with the routes we’ve followed, be it in a classic map or in Google Maps; readers can choose to receive texts and updates through email, and our friends can leave us comments, although they’ll have to subscribe to the site first. Each site has its guestbook. It has RSS. Very adequate for users who are looking for basic functions, although the interface could probably use a little update by now.

TravelPost: it has all of the mandatory tools: a personal journal, photo album, maps, etc. It’s possible to establish all of the cities and countries we’ve visited, to associate texts with them, and to observe what other users have written about these places, create itineraries, among other things. As we add more cities and countries, it’ll show what proportion of the world we’ve visited. Recently, they added functions to make reviews about destinations and hotels, a point in which they will compete with RealTravel (below).

RealTravel: the best design of all. It has some basic functions, such as travel map, a travellers posts qualifications system, photo publishing, blogroll creation and the possibility to make comments -only for registered users, though, a quite annoying limitation. Besides, there’s the possibility to make reviews about hotels and restaurants, and directly add them to the blog. By the way, the map we create in this site can be used at another blog outside RealTravel, since they provide us the script to paste it directly on our template.

TravelBlog: pretty basic, in visual and surfing terms. It’s built to emphasize the fact of quickly finding blogs about certain destinations. It has an image gallery and we can receive blogs updates through email.

Bootsnall: it also has basic functions, and it’s created to quickly find destinations. It has RSS feed, and can classify texts through tags. Visually, it’s not too attractive.

Travelblogs: another site with quite basic functions, and a not too elaborate visual aspect.They use a third party service for comments and email: Haloscan and Yahoo! Groups.

Travellers Point: it keeps the most traditional aspect of a blog, in this case, with a look closer to the old Movable Type templates. You can create categories for the entries, change the visual aspect, etc. It’s quite easey to use, with little emphasis to the community thing.