Given the broad description of intermediary provided by the Oxford English Dictionary, that is, ‘one who acts between others; an intermediate agent; a go-between middleman, mediator’, ‘something acting between persons or things, a medium, means’, intermediation plays a key role in travel writing, and can be addressed from many perspectives: the traveller as a mediator between two cultures, travel narratives as an intermediary between a place and the reader or, from the perspective of the genre, travel writing as the intermediary ‘between subjective inquiry and objective documentation’ (Holland and Huggan 1998, 11). However, for the purposes of this entry, the focus will be, less abstractly, on the physical agents that mediate between the traveller and the place. It is almost impossible to imagine a situation in which a traveller would interact with the world without the intermediation of human and non-human agents that facilitate, condition and occasionally distort the perception of the place visited. The work of the intermediary often depends of acts of translation, both linguistic and cultural, and links travel and travel writing to questions of cross-cultural (un)translatability.

While we tend to identify intermediaries with human agents, the role of nonhumans should not be overlooked. The importance of maps and book guides has been studied in relationship with the tourism industry (Enzensberger 1996), but not enough attention has been paid to their role in travel literature. The role of different means of transportation as factors determining the interaction of the subject with the world has been more widely studied, and the contemporary emphasis in materiality and Thing theory is bringing into focus the importance of scientific instruments as mediators (Gómez 2015) between the travel writer and nature. And of course, photography and the camera have been the topic of many studies and reflections on travel.

Even when human intermediaries and mediators play a vital role in travel history, it is surprising how little space the figure of these key participants occupy both in travel narratives and in the studies about the genre. For classificatory purposes, we can distinguish between two main functions played by intermediaries, even when very often they are combined: as travel aids, helping in one way or the other with the displacement of the traveller (guides, pathfinders, cooks, porters, servants), and as cultural mediators (translators, interpreters, tour guides, informants, negotiators, lovers).