The Swan Hellenic crewman who stole my brand new HTC Incredible S smartphone probably tossed it overboard soon after. The heat was suddenly on. He could lose his job. 

When Swan Hellenic bosses realised that someone had stolen my phone they must have scoured the ship and given the staff the full Swannish Inquisition. 

For Swan it was not just a slap in the face to one of their elderly and rich passengers but to a journalist who was about to write about their cruises for a newspaper and website with 72 million visitors. That's rather embarrassing to say the least.

But I reckon this minor travel incident is worth a blog. Not because I'm extremely irritated and inconvenienced. Losing hundreds of pounds worth of phone is bad for anyone. Losing a SIM card is bloomin' awkward too. But it's more interesting to the rest of you because it really highlights the reality of the upstairs/downstairs division on a cruise a ship. 

If you've followed this story so far - reading my last two blogs below - you'll know I've been giving a detailed insight into one of the press trips I did earlier this year. It was journey to Sweden to cruise on the Gota Canal. My article has now been published in the Mail on Sunday and subsequently on the dailymail.co.uk website here: http://tiny.cc/gg9fw

Please feel free to read it but I don't get paid anything for it's appearance on the website... Haha, not that I'm bitter or anything. You won't know of course that my piece has been shortened and slightly changed by the subs and that the picture desk rejected all the photos I took in favour of some library shots. 

The copy changes seem to be slightly toning down the copy, especially taming my description of just how tiny the cabin was. The Mail on Sunday increasingly has the policy of being positive about travel, not in an advertorial way, but just trying to inspire readers to take holidays ( and doubtless to respond to the travel adverts in those pages). 

The significance of the photos isn't so much the damage to my limited photographic ego, it's that I get paid extra if they use any of my shots. This can make the difference between the job being worth doing or not. So I try hard to take shots that they will find difficult not to use. In this case there were plenty of me in and around the boat and some of me demonstrating the diminutive nature of the cabin (ie: touching all four walls at once). Somehow they've resisted them this time and it means the job was borderline profitable. Nice trip, interesting memories but hardly a great career step.

The end of a press travel trip...

Sitting at a window seat on an SAS flight from Stockholm Arlanda back to Heathrow.

The last blog gave you some background on how a travel trip comes into being. I'm writing this one as I head home from the trip, so I'll give you some idea of how it went and what happens now.

I'm feeling a sense of achievement because I managed to keep my incidental bill on the Gota Canal cruise down to zero. That meant not a single drink with any meal or at either of the bars. Not even tea and coffee. Two days of tap water.

But I'm cross with myself for getting my currency calculations wrong and buying a wonderful melon and blueberry ice cream cone in Stockholm, not for the bargain 60p I'd thought, but for the more Swedish price of £6. My only other expenses were a small bottle of water for £2.20 and a 'gourmet kebab' from a street seller for £6 that turned out to be tasty but mostly the pitta was filled with mashed potato.

You might be thinking, yes, yes, but what about Sweden, the Gota Canal, the experience? Well that was all much as I'd expected from my research and the hundreds of similar trips I've been on before.

It took hours of complicated travelling to get to the start of the canal cruise, on board I discovered I was the only English speaker, the cabins were the smallest I have ever seen, the Gota Canal was pretty without ever being stunning, after a while I started feeling like a prisoner, I didn't sleep well in the stuffy tiny cabin, the food was good, everyone else seemed to drink enormous amounts of the alcohol. One old chap sat and chatted to me for a couple of hours on wicker chairs on the aft deck and ploughed through two bottles of wine at £70 each.

The Swedes love their Gota Canal, its history, the preserved pristine nature of the locks and buildings along the banks and the efficiency of the staff operating them. They all downed schnapps on the first day after a rousing drinking song.

So it's an interesting snapshot of Swedish lifestyle. It's a relaxing genteel cruise in a period boat with appropriately period facilities (ie no TV, radio, and shared bathrooms the size of a wardrobe - oh and there weren't any wardrobes).

I'll see. For now, i'm just looking forward to getting home, relaxing my financial constraints and maybe even treating myself to a beer tonight.

I'm sitting in one of the cheapest seats (with my back to the window facing the toilet door) on a local commuter train crowded with commuters and students travelling between Stockholm and Norrkoping at 6.50am on a Monday morning. It's another day in the life of a travel writer and I wanted to explain a bit more of how this mysterious job works. 

I'm fulfilling a commission for the Mail on Sunday newspaper/website to write a piece on the traditional steam boat trip on the Gota Canal that links the Swedish capital with Gothenburg in the south. It's a new angle for a cruise holiday piece.

I know the MoS run a lot of cruise reviews because they are such big advertisers. So I have been pitching the Travel Editor and Deputy Travel Editor for about 18 months with alternative cruise ideas that they might take and I would like to do. 

I wasn't that keen on spending a week plodding along the Rhine with a load of pensioners doing communal singing and talking about the war so I spent a lot of time researching cruises in North America, like the paddle boats on the Mississippi or the cruises along the St Lawrence seaway and into the Great Lakes. They came to nothing but this idea gradually came to fruition. 

Brief pause there while I peer over the shoulder of the bloke next to me to see a particularly scenic view of trees water and boats (typical Sweden view) racing past the window.

Okay, I got the commission in the form of an email from Travel Editor Frank Barrett in January. It was simply him saying "okay" to the idea I'm sent him by email. I'd chosen my timing carefully. The Mail on  Sunday travel department had just held their great Christmas party at a swanky London Hotel. 

I'd been there in my ironed shirt trying to stay sober as minor celebrities like the Hamiltons, Nigel Planer and Annika Rice got most people's attention. Afterwards I'd emailed to say 'thank you'… and then 'here is an idea for a piece' at the same time. It worked.

Now it's June. It took six months to get the trip organised. I'd contacted the London agency who handle Southern Sweden's PR. They arranged the canal cruise and transport to and from Stockholm (like this little two-storey train I'm on now), but passed me onto the press officer at Visit Sweden who provided flights and a night's accommodation in a hotel in Stockholm at each end of the cruise.

The rest was up to me: getting to Heathrow, airport parking, food and drink. There's no free dinner at the hotel and I'll hardly be able to eat out in Stockholm, it's so pricey. I'll stuff myself on the free hotel breakfast and eat fruit and flapjacks for the rest of the day. 

So with the pitching, researching, arranging, preparing and writing and photography this simple job will add up to more than a week's work. Nice work, but still work. If I'm very careful I can keep extra costs down to around £100 for the four-day trip. 

That's about 15% of the fee. If the incidental costs are any higher you have to start questioning whether it's worth doing the job. On the other side of that there's always a chance of selling a spin-off feature although the hotel last night didn't seem a very promising subject. Yet, as the man next to me with his ear-phones-in falls asleep, and I've no idea where in Sweden I am at the moment, I'm rather enjoying myself….

In my first year as a travelwriter I went to 27 countries. I learned pretty quickly that you can't just take every trip you are offered.

In that first year I saw a lot (and ate and drank a lot) but had no time to research the trips properly or find outlets to sell the stories. I spent a fortune on airport car parks, taxis and bottled water. I soon got bored with days spent at airports, on ferries and in tour buses.

It's clear that too much travel is as bad as not enough.

So now I've learned to do just what I need and want to do. That means snapping up well-paid commissioned trips or going to places that I really want to go. But not wasting my weeks on trips back to the over-publicised destinations that everyone has read a hundred times already.

I'm still waiting to go to Japan, Tahiti and I can't wait to go back to Patagonia, but I will never again spend ten days by myself in a cheap tourist hotel in Magalluf Mallorca just to see what it's like.

What this means is that every single day I have the odd experience of turning down travel PR people offering me free trips to places all over the world. Today, for example, a wet Monday in May, I've politely declined visits to Egypt, Scotland, the Lake District and Florida Keys.

I could spend the whole next month taking up those offers, earn no money and spend dreary hours on motorways and in airports in the process.

Instead I'm waiting for a trip to Sweden in a couple of weeks which will end up in the Mail on Sunday and thetraveleditor.com/. That'll do for now.

I'm reporting this, not to show off  - after any travelwriters will be getting the same offers as me - but to show what a strange view of travel us professionals get.

While most people dream for weeks of their next trip, we end up almost begrudging the whole process. It's work, nice work, but still work.

After a while even the smartest hotels and weirdest landscapes can seem like another day spent clutching a notebook, asking how you spell people's names and reminding yourself to take photos.

So for you, the reader, there's a good side to all this: jaded old travel hacks like me are unlikely to be bowled over by some average new hotel in Tuscany or another bunch of palm trees round a swimming pool in the Caribbean. We've seen it all before and know there are a hundred others just down the road.

So when we do rant about how good something is - then it REALLY has made an impression.