What do you think the scope for freelance travel writing is?

Depends on who you are and what your resources are. Everything-Everywhere.com guy basically started with nothing but cash and time. He had cash. Now he has more cash and a business based around traveling wherever he wants.

If you don't have cash, I hear a lot of people do writing for guides like Lonely Planet, but it's usually super crummy and doesn't pay much!

I'm a travel writer, not freelance; I work for a company. Personally I think this is a good way to go, but I'm guessing in most situations you have to have previous travel experience. Most people don't want to pay you to travel just because you say you can write about it. They want some value up front.

Not sure that's particularly helpful, but I thought I'd offer my thoughts.

Here's what I was told unofficially by someone from a leading travel magazine - get a sample and send it to the various publications. See if anyone is interested. You can write for various publications under different names. Check out all the travel publications out there - online and print. Don't forget lifestyle publications (magazines, newspapers, online) with a travel section. Also, inflight magazines for global airlines like United, British Airways, Qantas, etc

Good luck!

Depends totally on the magazine. You need to go and look at different publications and see what kind of articles they print, then tailor your query and article accordingly. And I second Purple Rose's tip about the inflight magazines.

I built up a travel writing platform via Examiner.com that I've parlayed into print magazine work. It also gets me invited to some really cool gigs. Latest one was covering the WDW Star Tours opening and included interviewing Anthony Daniels and some of the Industrial Light & Magic guys.

Travel writing isn't the main part of my career, but it's a heck of a lot of fun. Get lots of queries out there and build a platform if you can. It's not as easy to build a solid readership with Examiner as it once was. I'm lucky I got in early.

AAA publications are another market for travel writing. I'm currently pulling together a big query package for EnCompass (that's our AAA Colorado magazine).

If these queries don't sell, I'll probably reslant them for other AAA mags (those in surrounding states), for Sunset (western states lifestyle mag with a travel section) or for inflight mags.