"One goes not so much to see, but to tell afterward..." John Steinbeck

In The Times, The Sunday Times and within Times Online, we have consistently delivered the very best in travel advice and journalism to both inform and inspire, helping you to make the most of your holidays at home and abroad. Now, in a significant extension of our travel service, Times Online, in association with BMW, is launching an innovative new platform to showcase readers’ travel stories – Your World.

Share your stories, learn from your fellow travellers

From December, readers will be able to visit the Your World site to share personal experiences and the images that go along with those experiences, and in so doing tell their own tales about the incredible places that they have visited. Using a series of interactive maps created in partnership with our colleagues at The Times Atlas of the World, the site will provide a virtual window on the world that enables everyone to explore every corner of the planet, then to submit or seek out information and thus enhance our collective understanding of the world and all its diverse cultures.

Join our community, see yourself in print and online

By reading the stories and advice posted by other travellers, and by sharing your own experiences, you can become part of a vibrant travel community that tells the story of your world, in your words. From Bhutan to Bogota, from Newfoundland to Namibia – if you’ve been there, we’d like to know about it. In order to kick things off, we’d like to invite you to submit a travel experience right now. Stories will be published on the site and the most inspiring contributions will also appear in print in either The Times or The Sunday Times Travel sections, and feature on Classic FM.

Make a submission today

Just tell us your name, your hometown and your story in no more than 500 words and we'll publish it.
This month, we want your carnival travel stories and photos. Share some travel tips, tell us about your adventures and your contribution will be considered for publication in The Times Travel section - the deadline for entries is December 30.

Plus, visitors to the Your World site can also enter a new competition to win a holiday to South Africa. In the comfort of a new BMW 5 Series Touring, one lucky winner and a friend will get to drive the winding "Garden Route", one of the most scenic road journeys in the world. And no trip to South Africa would be complete without a brush with the local wildlife, so winners will have the chance to swim with sharks (inside a protective shark-diving cage) or simply to observe these incredible beasts from the comfort of a boat. As we'd like to hear all about your adventures on the website, we'll also throw in a top-of-the-range laptop PC to help you record your memories

Times recommends

• Bogus websites are conning hundreds out of their holidays
• The complete last minute holiday guide
• Croatia: the flashing blades of Korcula