Talisman Hotel, Damascus

Journalist Tom Gara recently wrote this article (registration required) for FT Tilt – a short piece which takes info from a blog post by Syria analyst Joshua Landis, which in turn digests 2008 figures from the Syrian Central Bureau of Statistics. In summary:

• Syria’s entire hotel industry employs just 11,224 people.

This represents 0.05% of the Syrian population of 22.5 million. Even if you generously infer that each employee is a breadwinner in a family of six, and thus that hotel employment supports 66,000 people, that means hotel wages support 0.3% of Syrians. Compare that to Jordan, where tourism (as a whole) supports perhaps 7% of Jordanians (160,000 families, totalling roughly half a million people out of a national population under 7 million).

• Total salaries paid to hotel employees are just under two billion Syrian pounds.

Landis notes that this averages out to roughly £185/US$300 a month per employee. He also notes that living costs for an average Syrian family in an urban area are almost US$700 a month.

• Hotels in Syria have a combined revenue of $279 million – split as five-star hotels $154m, all others $125m.

Landis compares this to one single five-star hotel in Beirut, the Phoenicia, which had revenues of $88 million last year. You could also – very unfairly – compare to Qatar, where the five-star sector took as much in one quarter as Syria’s five-star sector took in a year. What these figures hide, incidentally, is Syria’s growing strength in small “boutique” heritage hotels, many converted from historic mansions in Damascus and Aleppo – these count as luxury for guests (and are priced accordingly) but I believe don’t qualify as five-star properties.

The main point? As is self-evident to anyone who’s travelled there, Syria’s tourism infrastructure is virtually non-existent.

Travel is good

Two conclusions to draw. First, the obvious one: tourism puts millions of dollars into government coffers (which, in Syria, means the pockets of Assad’s family and friends). That can be hard to swallow. The figures quoted above are from 2008, when Syria was starting to making novelty appearances on newspaper-inspired travel wish-lists as a trending destination, and when journalists were visiting and writing enthusiastically.

Some people refuse to visit countries which have governments they deem oppressive – China, Israel, Zimbabwe, say – specifically because they don’t want their money to support tyrants. Others visit anyway in (hopefully) full knowledge of the situation, writing off the financial aspect in favour of the idea that one-to-one contacts can benefit both hosts and guests, often intangibly. I’m in the latter camp.

Governments, by necessity, work with mainstream players in the tourism industry. The least harmful way of spending money on travel in a place with unpleasant rulers can often be by travelling independently, or using small companies. But, sometimes, even that is not possible. Going to a place to see it with your own eyes can, on occasion, trump wider political considerations. I’d say bankroll a tyrant, if you can then use your experience to positive effect. Travel is good.

Shrink-wrapped

Mosaic, Maarat al-Numan

The second conclusion is only a bit of dreaming about how tourism could work wonders for a democratic Syria. The kinds of problems Egypt and Tunisia are now facing, having to correct decades of endemic corruption in their tourism industries, wouldn’t exist. That’s not to say Syrian corruption isn’t equally bad – it is – but as the figures above show, there’s been virtually no tourism industry to corrupt. The slate wouldn’t be so much clean as still shrink-wrapped.

Syria also wouldn’t have to invest billions to try and implant a concept of tourism, as Qatar and the UAE have done. The concept is already in place. This is a worldly, cosmopolitan society. People understand travel. People also understand entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency, having struggled under authoritarian top-down incompetence for years. With a bit of encouragement, Syria could be a model of development in grassroots, community-led tourism.

Jordanian tourism has had a thirty-year jump start on Syria. But once the Syrian people get the government they deserve, it’s not hard to see Syria taking a generation or less to leapfrog its neighbour. The country is vast, with historical and cultural interest to keep a visitor occupied for weeks or months. Traditions of hospitality are ingrained. Topography is diverse. Flying times from Europe and the Gulf are short. It’s not pie in the sky to imagine Syrian holidays as popular as Turkish or Moroccan.

Syria could even copy Egypt (perhaps Portugal or Cyprus are more equitable models), and use its Mediterranean coastline – remote, underdeveloped, west-facing – to corral sun-seeking northern Europeans, flying them direct to the beach and out again. Damascus could be a Barcelona. Palmyra could be an Pompeii.

Dream over. That’s going to take a revolution.

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.