Once, travel was about putting yourself out there. You went to a new place, and you figured stuff out. You got things wrong. You paid too much. Maybe you carried a guidebook – but they were sketchy at best. Hand-drawn maps. Skimpy on the detail (the 1987 Lonely Planet guide covered Jordan and Syria in 200 pages: the current LP Jordan alone is 360 pages). Dodgy, pennypinching advice (“Carry a pocketful of Smash with you, so the first time it rains you get a free meal” – apocryphal line from an unspecified guidebook, as related to me by a veteran writer in the late 90s. He was joking. I think.).

Now, though, there’s an urgency in the air. An author friend recently sent in his updated chapter on Palma de Mallorca, only for the editor to return it because he hadn’t supplied a street address for the cathedral. Another friend, working on a Cotswolds app, was required to find every public wifi hotspot between Cheltenham and Oxford, with price where applicable. Another, in Tuscany, was told to supply phone numbers for every church.

27.175444,78.042096 – Taj Mahal, Taj Ganj, Agra (U.P.) 282 001, India

Then there are the geocodes. Rough Guides have abandoned – for now – their newly announced requirement for authors to supply geocodes for every named building, attraction, point of interest, hotel, restaurant, bar, shop, cow and haystack, after authors (I’ve been one for the last 15 years) jumped up and down and shouted a lot about copyright and workload and other stuff, but the requirement will no doubt resurface in some other form, sooner or later. Geocodes in NYC or NSW I can understand – they can be useful in a big city – but geocodes in the Jordanian desert? As part of ordinary guide content for people touring around? Put the damn phone away. Talk to the bedouin. Look at the road. If there is one.

If you think travel is a sequence of unconnected dots which need linking, knowing geocodes make perfect sense. But if you think travel is about people, local knowledge, local stories, landscapes, journeys and experiences, knowing geocodes is about as useful as knowing the Taj Mahal’s address.

But the impulse to overguide doesn’t stop there.

When is a price not a price?

Since Rough Guides started, in 1982, they’ve had a system of price codes for accommodation: the author draws up nine brackets relating to the price for a double room in high season (e.g. 1 Under $10; 2 $10-20; 3 $20-30; and so on) so that every hotel in the book is given a price code, indicating an approximate range. When you’re travelling you quickly establish that hotels in, say, the 3 or 4 brackets suit you, so your eye goes straight to them. Or you stick with 1s and 2s – or you splurge on a 9.

It was a rough guide – and it matched what travel is like. But if you have that system you HAVE to tell the reader what the price code means. Rough Guides took their eye off the ball. With tweak after design tweak they hid the info that explained the price code system. You had to read the whole book to know where it was. By the end it was squashed into the gutter of the inside back cover, between some corporate blurb and the photo credits. It forced you to keep flipping to and fro. So when Rough Guides went to focus groups (oh yes, publishers pay through the nose to find out what you think), they realised people had to flip to and fro. Nobody explained price codes, so readers didn’t understand them. What does 5 mean? Where’s the price?

As of this year, Rough Guides have abandoned price codes. Now they will – like Lonely Planet – list an actual price for every hotel. Good, eh? Progress?

“In the book”

Except most hotels don’t have an actual price. There are different rates depending on how you book – direct, through a local travel agent, through a travel agent at home, through an online booking system, and so on. Prices shift according to demand. And season. And how far in advance you book. Some hotels offer cut-price deals every weekend; others drop prices midweek. There may be a range of room types, at different prices on different days. And then, of course, this year’s price is out of date before it can even be published.

A single price is actually a lie. It looks like it’s pinpoint accurate, putting power in the hands of the consumer – and it lets the publisher boast about how great their book is – but it’s really hiding the truth, and it’s really misleading the reader. A range of prices would be more honest, more accurate and more informative. Something like, ooh, a price code would do the job really well.

Hoteliers, too, prefer price codes, because they know that the inevitable result of quoting a price to a guidebook writer is that, 12 or 18 months down the line (if they’re lucky; perhaps years in the future), some white-kneed foreigner will be standing in reception, stabbing his fat finger into a guidebook and demanding a room AT THAT EXACT PRICE and not a penny more “because it says so in the book”.

Need to know

Online updates, in one form or another, get around some of that – but which publisher is going to pay to have authors keying in updated prices for every hotel in every book, every six months? Apps go out of date too; it’s just, when you download them, it doesn’t feel that way. They feel permanently new. Another lie.

The awful truth is that PEOPLE DON’T NEED TO KNOW an exact price for a hotel; they just need to know roughly how much to expect, then they can check out the booking options for themselves. They don’t need to know phone numbers for all the museums in Yerevan. They don’t need their mass-market guidebook to Oman or Brazil to be quoting geocodes for every village (unless they’re on a serious offroading expedition, in which case they wouldn’t be buying the Rough Guide anyway). It’s a waste of everyone’s time.

One researcher can’t find every public hotspot in a single city, let alone an entire region – and even if they did, what value would that information have in 3 months, when it’s only 95% accurate? And 12 months, when it’s 75% right?

The gilded cage

Overguiding – turn-by-turn directions, precise information that isn’t precise, contact information for places nobody needs to contact, illusory prices – is a gilded cage. It’s like Google: apparently beneficent, actually evil. We’ve been seduced by it, imagining all this information makes us more powerful, more knowledgeable, more travel-savvy. In truth, it traps us, by cutting off the need to explore. It packages the world; it’s an attempt to eliminate strangeness that is doomed to fail, because travel is strange. What does travel mean – in Cheltenham, as in Kamchatka, as in your very own street – if not finding stuff out for yourself?

Newspapers and travel magazines do it too, with their relentless Top 10s and Best Ofs – gutting and filleting destinations to shield us from the horror of Getting Something Wrong. Eating an unremarkable meal. Sightseeing in a touristy part of town. Sleeping in an ordinary hotel. The shame.

But who’s kidding who, here? If overguiding is bad for readers, bad for writers, bad for travellers and bad for locals, why do publishers do it? Who benefits?

In the comments, Debbie Ferm of Traveldither.com wrote, “Like all web copy, travel writing will need to be more scannable… almost like copywriting.” What a pity if she’s right!

What interests me are people and places. I’m a writer. I care about the travel industry only to the extent of how it impacts on the stories I want to tell. The stuff I’m proud to write – which, not coincidentally, matches the stuff I like to read – is not round-ups or hotel reviews or sponsored puffs. That’s for paying the bills. When I’m a doddery old grandpa, few people may care about my stories of travel, but absolutely nobody will give a monkeys about my opinion of the travel industry in the long-forgotten 2010s.

Newspapers have painted themselves into a corner. By abandoning the journalistic model of paying skilled writers to report on people and places, they turned themselves into mouthpieces for the travel industry, which has funded the creation of travel ‘content’ for years now.

That model is now breaking down, as the travel industry withdraws its funding and cuts back on print advertising. This has left traditional media high and dry: by their parsimony and, some might say, corruption in years gone by, they’ve killed the goose.

Online travel writing is in a different place. Divisions and micro-definitions get boring, but perhaps one is justified here: travel journalism, i.e. round-ups, site reports, reviews, listings, investigations, industry analysis, is different from travel writing, i.e. stories of people and places, features, profiles, cultural insight, long-form creativity.

Both are valid. Thanks to the old media models, the former dominates. It shouldn’t.

And, online, it needn’t. Long-form feature writing about travel matters. It can do things that no other kind of writing can do, and can make connections that might otherwise never be made. Old media nonetheless sold it down the river.

If we accept Debbie’s notion of online travel writing as glorified holiday-brochure copywriting, SEO’d to within an inch of its life, the same thing will happen again.

I approached the relevant tourist board and requested a return flight to Destination X plus hotel accommodation for me to do my research. They got the ball rolling. All totally standard practice – nothing out of the ordinary yet.

As freelancers will know, though, two commissions are rarely enough to make a living. So I pitched another idea from Destination X to a different National Newspaper Travel Editor (NNTE 2), who is responsible for that newspaper’s online travel content. He liked it, but said there was no budget to pay me for it.

Modest proposal

So I suggested an alternative. Instead of having the newspaper pay me to write about Destination X, how about if I asked the tourist board to pay me instead? It wouldn’t be ‘advertorial’ – where a travel article (or whole section) is sponsored by a tourist board or travel company who dictate what gets written. All my research and writing would be done alone as normal and I would file directly to the editor – but the tourist board would foot the bill for my time and, erhmm, expertise. Result: the paper gets great content from which it can generate revenue, I get paid and Destination X gets coverage – all happy, right?

Nope. My modest proposal was rejected out of hand. NNTE 2 saw it as tying him to the tourist board. It was a ‘no’ on principle.

So I took yet another pitch about Destination X to a different National Newspaper Travel Editor. NNTE 3 liked the idea and was happy to run it – it tied in nicely with a similarly themed article from the same region that was already in his schedules – but again had no budget to pay me. I suggested the alternative payment method, but again it was refused on principle.

Principles

I wonder, though, what principle is at stake. Newspapers have no (or very little) money to pay for travel articles. NNTE 3 told me he now runs only one freelance piece a week, if that. Other newspapers commission nothing from freelancers at all anymore, running only “What I Did On My Holidays” articles written by celebs, staffers from other sections of the same newspaper and authors with a book to plug. Almost all seem to lament losing the insight, the expertise and the sheer variety of freelance content – but their hands are tied.

Yet I think both NNTEs I approached thought my payment idea risked undermining their credibility. I wonder, with respect all round, how much of that is left. Opening one recent national newspaper travel section, you got a welcome message from the boss of a tourist board followed by a dozen articles praising his region – including the likes of How Great It Is To Walk In The [X] Hills footed by a paragraph mentioning that [X] Railways serves all the destinations mentioned in the article, and underlined by a chunky banner advert for, oh, [X] Railways.

I’m not questioning any individual journalist’s integrity – or the necessity for that newspaper to seek funding through sponsorship – but I wonder how much credibility the public gives to such material. It was, effectively, a brochure in newspaper form. Handy for a spare weekend, but Woodward & Bernstein it ain’t.

Editorial independence

The key point of principle rests on the newspapers’ reputation for editorial independence. That, traditionally, has depended on their ability to fund their businesses through interspersing editorial with advertising. That model is now under severe threat.

How to pay the piper?

So far so bad. Yet with travel advertorial, the tail has begun wagging the dog. Companies with a vested interest are starting to be able to dictate terms. With the ongoing financial reshaping of the industry, editorial independence is dangerously threatened.

Putting an end to advertorial – by disconnecting the right of the journalist to get paid from the payer’s being able to control what is written – seems to me to be an innovative and effective route back to integrity and independence.

NNTE 2 queried what would happen if he didn’t like the piece I wrote and chose not to run it. Perhaps he thought he’d be in hock to the person paying my fee. But he – as now – would have no contact, and certainly no relationship, with the tourist board or travel firm paying me. If the story isn’t good enough to run, I simply wouldn’t get paid – but I would then be free to take it elsewhere. Since it would have no price-tag attached, the chances of one or other newspaper/magazine somewhere in the world picking it up for publication would be much higher than at present, where a ‘killed’ story is effectively dead in the water. I would then go back to my fee-payer and renegotiate.

Would a tourist board with extra-deep pockets be able to dictate to a writer what they should write about? Anything’s possible – but any journalist worth their salt would know when they’re being fed a line and would reject it for the sake of their own reputation, and (more to the point) any editor worth theirs would be able to detect a whitewash instantly. Tourist boards and travel firms already heavily subsidise the writing of most travel journalism, with literally thousands spent behind the scenes on a single article for air tickets, hotels, tours, guides and activities. Does it matter where the final, relatively insignificant cash fee to the journalist comes from?

In an industry unable to pay its suppliers, securing outside funding while safeguarding quality could actually put everybody on their toes and, in effect, raise standards. Suddenly, travel journalists would be motivated to double-check their sources. Reputations would be at stake.

Into the abyss

(Credit: myopera.com)

Travel journalism is staring into the abyss. The economics of the industry don’t really work, and haven’t done since newspapers started to rely on travel firms to facilitate creation of content instead of paying to send their own travel journalists abroad. With a shrinking world having reduced the experiential gap between writer and reader to almost nothing, travel journalists – unfairly – have a reputation as just another breed of fat-cats, swanning about being showered with freebies by travel companies and airlines in return for writing more or less bland holiday reports. The quid-pro-quo editorial models currently in place – airline gives journo ticket; journo namechecks airline in return – perpetuate that myth. Overtly sponsored advertorial doesn’t help.

Since newspapers are increasingly unable to pay for professionally produced, independent travel content, I thought my modest proposal to have someone else cough up might work. Clearly, I was wrong. But some alternative system has to be invented soon. I’m old-fashioned enough to think that people still appreciate well-written, insightful, long-form travel journalism – writing that is closer in spirit to the foreign pages than the lifestyle supplement. If I’m right, but the newspapers won’t pay for it, who will?

Footnote

No sour grapes, by the way. I think NNTE 2 and 3 have missed an opportunity, but that’s OK; I can appreciate that now is perhaps not the time to be testing new models on an ad-hoc basis. I’m talking to both of them about other ideas. Meanwhile, anyone thinking of trying to start out in travel journalism should be aware that I also spoke to NNTE 4 (no freelance budget; staffers only), NNTE 5 (Destination X is too far down our wishlist), NNTE 6 (no freelance budget)… It’s a jungle out there. NNTE 1 has my full attention.