The travel media

Two forms of branding cooperate and sometimes compete in the relationship between tourist destinations and travel journalists: place-branding, which has been my primary focus thus far, and the publication’s branding, which I will attend to in this chapter. Although the travel media are, in some important respects, part of the tourism industry and have a vested interest in the positive mediation of destinations and tourism products, for the genre of travel journalism to be of practical use to corporeal travellers its descriptions and advice must be reliable. One way for individuals to test a publication’s reliability is to take the trips they read about, but this overlooks the role played by travel journalism in helping people choose between destinations. The number of travel journalism articles that can be consumed by a publication’s readers far exceeds the number of destinations visited. In travel media, as in tourism, readers and potential readers use brands to assess the value they can expect to derive from a product both for practical purposes and for the construction of their own identity. Travel sections in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers are generally subsumed under the brand of the parent publication, but travel magazines must forge their own reputations. Glossy high-end travel publications often include claims of specialist knowledge and integrity when positioning their products in the market. Lonely Planet Traveller guarantees “trusted, independent travel advice that has been gathered without fear or favour” (2014, p. 4);Conde Nast Traveller pledges “Truth in Travel…honest, first-hand opinion and must-have information…the unbiased inside track, with integrity and attitude” (2014, p. 12); National Geographic Traveler assures us that “nobody knows this world better”, promises to report on “destinations of distinction and character” and says it supports “efforts to keep them that way – believing that to enhance an authentic sense of place will benefit both travelers and the locations they visit” (2014, cover and p. 4); and Travel + Leisure insists it is “the world’s most influential travel brand”, offering “insider access to destinations around the globe” (2015) from writers who “travel incognito wherever possible” and “generally do not accept free travel or take press trips” (2014, p. 18). There are strong structural incentives for travel media institutions to be on

good terms with government tourism organisations even if their staff and freelance journalists do not accept hosted travel. Nevertheless, in the relationship between the media and antagonists in political conflicts, “[p]ower is a question of relative

dependence: who needs whom more at the time of the transaction” (Wolfsfeld 1997, p. 14). A travel publication’s brand may benefit from editorial content containing “constructive” criticism of a destination’s policies if from a mediabranding perspective it can be seen as contributing to a high standard of service to readers and being in the long-term best interests of the destination itself. This may be the case even when, as in most instances, criticism is generally absent from the publication’s editorial content, or absent from other editorial content about the same destination. The following comments from freelance United States travel journalist Stephen Metcalf are worth quoting at length for their nuanced explication of how the complexities of the travel media business model can accommodate a degree of this kind of journalistic agency by travel journalists secure in their habitus:

Before anyone gives me an explicit command about how serious or unserious they want a specific piece to be, or how much they want me to play up the deliciousness of the food and underplay the complexity of the local politics – you know, before anyone says anything explicit – we are all working within a set of tacit assumptions. I mean, I’m at this point, I think it has to be said, something of a professional. And as a professional I understand that I’m writing for a specific outlet. And I understand that that outlet is – that their business model – is advertising driven. It’s certainly newsstand sales [that] make up a proportion of it, so it’s – quite a lot of it – is advertising-driven, and their advertisers are travel companies and airlines… I am writing within a certain set of very, very established expectations, and those expectations are so well established they barely even need to be articulated. So, interestingly, I’ve never, ever had the open conversation with an editor of either a book review or a travel outlet in which they’ve said, “Look, you can’t piss off our advertisers,” but I think that’s only because we all know that, and we all start from that assumption, and I understood that I was writing what was essentially a travel piece. Now the interesting thing is [that] within that understanding there’s some room to play. And one of the reasons there’s some room to play is that…people do want to read journalism and they want the journalism to be very distinct from the advertising. And they understand when something is an ad, i.e. something is designed entirely to sell them a product by the maker of the product. And they understand that journalism is something about an individual sensibility going to a faraway place and encountering it with a fair degree of honesty and sensitivity… I do think that people don’t want the same thing when they read journalism as they want when they look at an advertisement. And people who produce magazines understand this.