RATING THE TRAVEL MAGS
By Larry Dobrow

(Note: While the percentage of travel ad budgets going into new media increases year after year, the amount garnered by travel magazines is still gargantuan. By exclusive invitation, here to cast his unique eye on the recent offerings of six category titles is well-known media critic, Larry Dobrow)


As I pored over a stack of high-end travel titles – Travel + Leisure, Sherman's Travel, Condé Nast Traveler, Town & Country Travel, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Culture + Travel – a sudden realization dawned on me. These publications share more in common with pornographic mags than with any other genre.

Oh, sure, the travel titles feature fewer lower-back tattoos and only occasionally work the word "throbbing" into their stories, plus the lighting in the photos is much less harsh. But the general concept is the same: The two genres traffic in wish-fulfillment, serving up escapist fluff in a manner that rarely gels with actionable reality for all but the most determined readers. Sometimes a fantasy is all you need, I suppose.

The travel mags share an awful lot in common beyond that. They visit the same destinations (Southeast Asia appears to be quite popular with the cool kids nowadays). They dot the front and back of their books with hints 'n tips organized under ever-colorful monikers, like "Dispatches" or "Buzz" or "The Get" (hello, product pimping). They are unable to resist the easy PR bait, several running pieces timed to the release of precious flicks like The Darjeeling Limited (go, India!).

And, oh!, the story leads. Travel writers may well be the most pretentious group of individuals on this or any other planet, as witnessed by the fact that they are constitutionally incapable of beginning a piece with anything other than a LOOK AT ME! I AM A WONDERFULLY DESCRIPTIVE WRITER! salvo. "We had seen too much of Florence in summer: the hordes of tourists, the brutal heat, the general irritation brought on by jostling and discomfort," begins one Town & Country Travel piece. Gee, why stop there? Were your feet blistered? Did you sweat? Don't tell me about Florence; tell me about your armpits.

Or try on this Culture + Travel opening blast for size: "At Ristorante Cracco in Milan, there are no blood-ripe tomatoes spilling out of a bowl by the entrance, no dangling salami cured in somebody's uncle's garage, no Slow Food snail logos, and positively no one leaping out of the kitchen to enthrall diners with family photos and opera buffa plaints about arms withered from stirring polenta." Anybody who has the energy to read the rest of the story is of hardier stock than I.

Yeah, maybe these florid leads trump the drier-than-cardboard alternative – "Albania borders on the Adriatic. Its land is mostly mountainous and its chief export is chrome" – but not by much. Editors of these magazines would be advised to prune their staffs of any writer whose default setting is "whimsically anecdotal."

So no, I'm not exactly blown away by the creativity or the thoughtfulness of the genre. Which isn't to say that it doesn't have its more responsible practitioners. The October issue of Condé Nast Traveler rises above the riff-raff, in that it's the only one of the six mags that comes across as down-to-earth – kinda ironic, given its parent company's rep of pretending that sub-$150,000 households don't exist.

Traveler excels owing to its balance. It can hoity-toity with the best of 'em, as in the dour and information-free "Singapore Express" photo spread. But for every style-obsessed piece like this one, there are a handful of items that should appeal to a wide swath of the travel-fantasist population. Be sure to check out the Myanmar and Hangzhou travelogues.

Too, CN Traveler earns gold stars for its practical bent. The October issue devotes a handful of pages to business travel, including picks for packet folders and gadget chargers as well as more expected fare like hotel ratings. It also serves up my favorite regular feature in any of the mags, an ombudsman column that tackles readers' problems with wayward hospitality-biz companies. Fight the power!

Travel + Leisure, probably the second sharpest of the titles, could use a bit of that populism. As the thickest of the six books, you'd think that it would aim slightly lower than the others (more ads = more space to fill = more topical desperation, is usually how it works). Instead, it hits surprisingly upscale, especially in its nicely comprehensive "Global Guide to Arts & Culture." Of all the excursions outlined in the six magazines, the ones featured here seem most doable.

The writing is uniformly clear, with plenty of personality to be found in the "T&L Journal" visits to Brighton Beach and Chile. I just wish the mag would invest as much in its design and photography as it does in its words. The photographs in T+L simply don't compare with those in the other mags, and it doesn't help that the mag runs them kinda small.

That's not a problem faced by Town & Country Travel, which prizes lush shots of trees, lakes and semi-posed natives over all else. Really, the mag oughta just dispense with nouns and verbs entirely, as the personalized travel accounts can't hold a candle to the photos that accompany them.

I don't like T&C Travel's relative formality. With a few exceptions – the "Favorite Finds in Miami," etc. – the mag is entirely devoid of whimsy. It makes fantasizing about faraway islands a chore, which is almost impossible. The story-behind-the-photo last-page piece devolves into bland description, while the editor's letter prattles humorlessly about "the decline of the American Vacation," a topic already surveyed in roughly 3,737,264 other stories. My advice? Lighten up, kids. Swing a little.

Judging by the cover shot of T: The New York Times Style Magazine fall travel issue, you'd think that the magazine would've cornered the market on such hipness. On it, an impeccably coiffed model wearing a Jackie O-ish top gazes emotionlessly into the distance, with the Washington Monument looming ominously in the background. I think I speak for all readers when I ask: Huh?

In my mind, there is no pressing reason for any of the Times magazine supplements, other than to snare the prestige advertisers that are starting to treat newspapers as if infected with the Ebola virus. The T supplement strives for authenticity, as in the hipster-strewn piece on Goteborg, and instead comes off as the old guy trying to score points with the college girls. Nothing in here is particularly bad, but none of the stories pop off the page; there's little that elicits more than a that-was-OK shrug. If I'm the Times, I leave the tips about packing shoes to the Travel + Leisures of the world, and focus my efforts on the uniformly diverting, expansive travel pieces in the Sunday paper.

Sherman's Travel, a new title, comes out of the gate with a similar case of the blahs. I'm not sure its central premise – "smart luxury values," flagged on the cover – makes sense for a magazine in this genre. The whole idea of luxury, as I understand it, is that value ceases to become a consideration, right? You pay for the luxe product and service, and for the tacit exclusion of those who can't stomach the lofty price tags. Or something like that.

I'd like to see Sherman's Travel aim a bit lower. The "Mexico 101" piece offers a perfect primer on beaches and tourist refuges alike; tonally, this would seem to be the mag's sweet spot. It should ditch many of the semi-relevant front-of-book pieces ("Cocktail Confidential," the "Inn-Famous" piece on hotels with a celebrity sheen), replacing them with ones that explore the intersection of mid-range travel and value. It's not too late for an attitude adjustment: The mag could more effectively compete with that Arthur Froemmer guy – wait, is it Arthur Froemmer or Arthur Treacher? I can't keep those two titans of industry straight – than with luxury lifers like Condé Nast and Town & Country.

As for Culture + Travel, well, its name tells you pretty much all you need to know. The publication visits a bunch of places and discusses the cultural doohickeys nearby. The end.

I'll say this, though: The mag looks terrific, more like a well-appointed art journal than a travel rag. You may wonder why Culture + Travel embarks on a "Latino Graffiti Odyssey," but you can't help but admire the artful way that it presents around 30 images over six pages. Ultimately, though, it falls short when it lowers its sights via anybody-can-do-this "Compass" guides to Rome and Venice. The mag should leave the guidebook crap to the guidebooks, and focus on the art.

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