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Tags: Travel Magazines / Budget Travel / Arthur Frommer / Travel Media / → All Tags
What Is Going On At Budget Travel Magazine?
After the recent chopping of magazines like Gourmet, it's safe to say that print media is beyond shaking in their boots; they're already cleaning out desks. The latest magazine closure scare came at Budget Travel, formerly under Arthur Frommer's wing but now controlled by the Washington Post Co.
On Friday, rumors began that the magazine would announce its closure on Monday (today). NY Mag reached Editor-In-Chief Nina Willdorf for comments only to receive a cryptic "heading out town"-type response.
Instead of closing today, it was only reported that "it's business as usual," but execs did hold a meeting to discuss the future of the magazine. Although it looks like no one lost their jobs today, employees in ad sales were told to hold on the February issues. Will the scythe of death fall on Budget Travel in January 2010, or—even worse—around the holidays? Rest assured that we'll continue to follow this story.
Related Stories:
· Magazine Deathwatch: Budget Travel [Mediabistro]
· Budget Travel Shuttering? [NYMag]
· Travel Magazines [Jaunted]
[Photo: Kenn Wilson]
Tags: Travel News / Travel Magazines / Awards / Award Shows / → All Tags
Virgin America, Singapore Airlines Take Tops In Condé Nast Traveler Awards
Last night in New York (the unfriendliest city in the nation, according to results), Condé Nast Traveler held the awards reception for their 2009 Readers Choice Awards, hosted by Stanley Tucci and Mary Louise Parker and seeing big wigs like Richard Branson and David Cush (of Virgin America) in attendance.
This year, 25,000 of CN Traveler's readers voted for their favorites in such categories as best cruise line, best Asian city, and even top car rental agencies. While with some winners, we wonder how they even got on the ballot (Capri is one of the best European islands? Maybe 20 years ago), we absolutely saw no competition for some of the winners (Singapore Airlines took tops in international airlines again}.
While reading the winners after the jump, keep in mind that Traveler's demographic skews a bit older and affluent, so seeing the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz take Top European Resort even though it feels like no one's been there in eighty years is not so surprising, as is the fact that the Four Seasons positively cleaned up in some hotel categories.
Tags: Travel Promotions / Travel + Leisure / Cathay Pacific / Travel Magazines / → All Tags
Cathay Pacific Believes in Print Media
Do you still enjoy the feel of a glossy mag when it comes to feeding your travel daydreams? One of our favorite airlines, Cathay Pacific, obviously agrees because they've set up a partnership with Travel + Leisure. The tempting deal, to throw in a free one-year subscription to T+L for every traveler who books a flight online through Cathay Pacific's US website, is like getting a gift with purchase.
Now we're definitely fans of Cathay, and sure don't mind T&L either, but we're not 100% sure that a free mag would be a deciding factor for making an airline booking these days. The fine print states that the deal gives you 12 issues of T+L valued at $12 each, so that's $144.
In the meantime we're thinking, hey—there's a financial crisis going on here, wouldn't we like to pocket at least a hundred bucks of that instead, and just get our travel tips and info online?
Anyhow, if you find yourself having to book a ticket anyways, then be sure to book before June 20 for the subscription deal. Unfortunately it's only available for those in the United States or Canada, not to mention that the flight you book must depart from this hemisphere too.
Related Stories:
· Travel + Leisure Coverage [Jaunted]
· Cathay Pacific Coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: superciliousness]
Tags: Travel Media / Travel Magazines / → All Tags
Sherman's Travel: Movin' On Up
Reverse media spin-off! ShermansTravel, one of the many travel deal aggregators on the web, has just launched a dead tree version of their site. Called Sherman's Travel (oh, the Old Media and their emphasis on punctuation), the magazine is meant to compete with Budget Travel. No word yet on what the circulation is meant to be, although the newsletter is sent to over 3.5 million subscribers.
We always wish new travel magazines the best of luck, but it's a difficult niche of a difficult industry. Overhead is higher than most, and even the fact-checking process can take extra time and is more involved than verifying what Beyoncé wore to the photo shoot. Mr. Sherman, of the web site and magazine, said that they hope to be the go-to place for "luxury value". We love the idea of such a thing; let's hope that the term doesn't become an oxymoron anytime soon.
Related Stories:
· Travel Site Plans Spin-Off [NYT]
Tags: Travel Magazines / Design / → All Tags
Wallpaper* August 2006 Digest
The cover of Wallpaper's annual Design Directory is a bit of a mess: one or another version of pop art meets some kind of bad "cyber" art circa 1996. What's the aim here?
Happily, the cover doesn't direct the book. Possibly the most surprising item is Eva Hagberg's on the modernist gems strewn around Columbus, Indiana. Columbus, it turns out, can claim amazing buildings designed by the Saarinens, Deborah Berke, and I.M. Pei, among others.
Yet possibly even more surprising than an ode to a town in Indiana is Warren Singh Bartlett's "Trip" feature on Riyadh and Jeddah, and not only because tourism to Saudi Arabia is, as yet, close to nonexistent for non-Muslims. The feature functions more as a sociology of contemporary Saudi Arabia than as a travel primer. We learn, for example, that Bluetooth is a key flirting technology, which makes the Kingdom seem considerably less exotic to anyone who's spent time watching television advertisements in, say, Germany.
Also in the August issue: some gorgeous California houses by Ray Kappe, Neon phones designed by Naoto Fukasawa, South American fashion designers, a tribute to barely trafficked Gander International Airport, and a dossier on the biggest names in Italian design.
Tags: Travel Magazines / Tourism / → All Tags
Time Out Beirut Out of Time
What happens when tourism and politics are out of alignment? Beirut is what happens. Sure, it was one of Travel and Leisure's top ten cities to visit this year in the most recent issue of the magazine, but that's already outdated, thanks to the bombing that's taken place. An article in this week's New York talks with Ramsay Short, the editor of the months-old Time Out Beirut.
Understandably, he's quite sad about the recent turn of events, although he felt that Americans saw the city in the same way they did in the 80s. Mostly, though, there's a real sense of what has already been lost, no matter how Beirut may recover:
"Time Out is a magazine about arts and culture," Ramsay Short says. "But everything has been canceled and half my staff have left the country." Last year, he published A Hedonist's Guide to Beirut. "Maybe sales will go up," he says. "It'll almost be a collector's item of what was this high point, what now seems like a dream."Maybe P.J. O'Rourke's article touring Lebanon during the civil war in the 80s will become the most useful guidebook to the region yet again. Let's hope not.
Related Stories:
· Life in Beirut Before Wartime [NYM]
· A Ramble Through the Rankings [Jaunted]
· Beirut [Time Out]
Tags: Travel Magazines / Venice / → All Tags
Bridge of Sighs, Wallet of Size
Finally, Matt Gross of the New York Times Frugal Traveler column has decided to undertake something of a challenge. While we've liked the weekly reports thus far, traveling on the cheap where everything is cheap is less of a trial than making your way through Venice on a budget, as he did today.
Venice can feel like a giant tourist trap. There are obligatory things to see all in once place, and as Matt mentions, it's hard to feel like you're having a moment if you've paid 14 euro for a bellini at Harry's Bar. He recommends the spritz, a combination of prosecco and Campari, instead, but it's still depressing.
Ultimately, for us, Venice is a lot like living in New York City. It's great if you're a student and don't mind surviving on sandwiches and pizza, or if you have a ton of money, enough to not care how much you have to drop to do everything you want (including a 100 euro water taxi ride to the airport, which we highly recommend). Doing it in the middle is the hardest. Besides, gondolas are cheesy, but you have to do it at least once. Where's the fun in denying yourself a gondola ride?
[Image via pensiero/Flickr]
Related Stories:
· Making the Most of Venice [NYT]
Tags: Adventure Travel / Travel Magazines / → All Tags
Our Final West Coast Lifestyle Magazine Travel Tips Summary
This is our last summary of West Coast lifestyle magazine summer travel tips, we swear!
After noticing the perplexing status of Tofino in two West Coast US magazines as a top summer destination, we were just slightly worried when we picked up Seattle Metropolitan the other day at a Borders in Tacoma.
It turns out that there was no real reason to be scared. Seattle Metropolitan organizes things conceptually, see, so there's no opportunity to be hit over the head by our East Coast failure to grasp the reality that Tofino is the hottest new spot on the globe.
Phew. Sally Farhat and Val Mallinson's dossier of Seattle-proximate getaways is organized into several categories, including (among others) extremish outdoorsy activities, family fun, high-end retreats, foodie fixes, and chill-out zones.
Highlights? We dig the idea of escaping to a Benedictine monastery on Shaw Island, one of the stunning San Juan Islands. Our Lady of the Rock Monastery sounds like a peaceful retreat. Also rockin: Carlton, Oregon's Abbey Road Farm , a working farm in the middle of Oregon's Wine Country.
Tags: Travel Magazines / Puglia / → All Tags
Nothing New Under the Sun
Sure, Jeroen Bergmans of Wallpaper* may have recently anointed Puglia, in the south of Italy, as the next big thing. But that's not enough for Condé Nast Traveler. Nope, they prefer to explain the situation in many, many words, none of which are particularly service-y. Avoiding yet another catalogue of restaurants and bars that are nebulously hip is a perfectly acceptable way to pen an article, right?
Sadly, the hook was the construction of scores of new hotels in the region, but they don't seem to get much ink, save a section jammed into the end. Nor was there much mention of Pugilese cities save Bari, which is known for being unpleasant compared to the rest of the area--it's where you take the ferry to get to Albania, after all.
We learned some odd facts nonetheless. If Southern Italy were separated from the North, it would be one of the poorest countries in Europe was a surprising tidbit, as was the existence of the barattiere, a "cucumber-melon hybrid". Good things come from hybridizing fruits and vegetables--just look at broccoli, or Suri Cruise--but we never thought we'd hear about that kind of combo. Sounds delish.
Still, a little more service would be appreciated, even though, as our friend put it, "CN Traveler thinks anointing Puglia as the next big thing is service enough".
[Image via hobo pd/Flickr]
Related Stories:
· Something New Under the Sun [CN Traveler]
· Finding Destinations Before They're Over [Jaunted]
Tags: Travel Magazines / → All Tags
Holy Tofino
Did Tofino launch a stealth PR campaign that somehow passed us by?
No sooner did we extol the West Coast pleasures of Sunset Magazine, in particular its special summer travel issue's featured destinations, than we chanced upon yet another western US mag banging the drum for Tofino.
Portland Monthly touts northwestern summer getaways in its May 2006 issue. Tofino, Coeur d'Alene, Glacier Bay National Park, Vancouver, and Montana's Big Sky country are featured destinations.
All this attention on Tofino makes us wonder if we're missing something.
Three Oregon road trips also see the light of print in Portland Monthly's May issue. We dig the three-day itinerary that cuts through the state's utterly desolate center, from the village of Plush in the south to the town of Bend. C'mon--who wouldn't want to visit Bend, Oregon?
[Image via bravewest/Flickr]
Tags: Travel Magazines / Celeb Travel / Baja / → All Tags
Vanity Fair Travel: The New Leader in Pomposity
The new Vanity Fair Travel section, in the May issue, opens with a listing of high-end retail that intends to escape "the homogenized high street of Prada, Gap, and Chanel." Thank God. Nothing is more oppressive than page after page of Chanel and Prada.
Apparently the antidote to the beaten retail path arrives in the form of Argentine polo shop La Martina, São Paolo's emporium of over-the-top luxury Daslu, and Chistina Yu's Hanoi Ipa-Nima handbag shop, among others.
In terms of destinations, the supplement ensnares Beijing, Moscow, Kenya (sample ranch rental just $14,000 a week!), and Baja California. Editor Victoria Mather leads with a comparison of Baja and Sienna Miller that reads as follows:
If Baja California were a person it would be Sienna Miller: boho-gone-smart, and definitely in vogue.Baja Californians everywhere are doubtlessly overjoyed at the rechristening of a tiny speck of their peninsula as "boho-gone-smart", netting said peninsular speck a comparison to Sienna Miller in the process. All Oaxaca got was a comparison to Nicole Richie.
We kid. We know that Baja is hip, and wish we could be lunching on tortillas right now while watching the surf. We just don't want to be thinking about B-list actresses while we're there.
Tags: Wallpaper* / Design / Israel / Travel Magazines / Berlin / → All Tags
Wallpaper* Digest, May 2006 Edition
The May issue of Wallpaper* is the most inspiring issue of the magazine in quite some time, with the mag's Newspaper section leading the way.
Case in point: David Kaufman's article on the proliferation of Israeli café chains, several of which are eyeing international markets. The accompanying sidebar pegs 12 coffee bar chains around the world, including Vienna's iconic Aida, Jordan's Blue Fig, California's Peet's, and Cape Town's Vida e Caffé. The Cape Town chain gets the highest aesthetic praise.
Also covered in the section is the happy return of Ostalgie. Berlin's former East German State Council building, circa 1964, has morphed into the European School of Management and Technology. (It's hard to keep the excitement out of a place like that, we guess) The honors go to HG Merz, an architecture firm focusing on museums and renovations, with offices in Stuttgart and Berlin.
Also noteworthy in the May issue: Macau travel, Portuguese canned fish packaging, Paris' Stalingrad 'hood, and new Swedish furniture designers. Note that South Africa joins the Wallpaper pricing elite, with the price of the magazine now listed in rand. We know just the coffee shop for reading the mag.
Related Stories:
· Spanish Fly [Jaunted]
