Erik Torkells, the editor of Budget Travel, will leave his magazine on July 15, a tipster tells us:
ET is leaving BT... without a new project lined up. I bet he was asked to leave. The July issue was only like 85 pages.
Actually, the July/August issue has 92 pages. But that doesn't mean Torkells is sticking around. Says the man himself:
I am indeed leaving. It's been a great run, and BT has come farther than I'd ever hoped. But I like to leave a party when it's still fun, and I wanted to go out on top--in the wake of being a National Magazine Award finalist.
The new Gridskipper launched yesterday, after a few weeks of tinkering, a change of ownership and a change of spring into summer. The verdict? Not too many fans out there.
We actually just got done Windexing our glass house--long weekend coming up, you know--so we don't plan to throw any stones just yet. But, damn, just about everybody else has.
On his blog, the Andy Rooney of travel, Arthur Frommer, frequently gripes about the pricey experiences sometimes covered in The New York Times' Sunday travel section. (Recently he was half-mystified, half-offended that the Times would report on The Plaza hotel, where rooms go for $875 a night.) But in his most recent rant--about this mention of a one-day, £345 Orient-Express train trip, Frommer has gone from crotchety complainer to conspiracy theorist:
The New York Times travel section has now plumbed such depths of absurdity that I, for one, have concluded that this senselessness can't be accidental. The decision to sprinkle the pages of a travel section with references to sky-high travel offerings can only have come about from a directive from on high to do so.
It must be part of an effort to attract advertising from the producers of luxury goods ... In writing as they do, I am now convinced that the travel writers and junior travel editors of the New York Times are attempting to execute a policy consciously set down by the Times.
Sounds bad! And it would be--if Frommer's suspicions had any basis in reality.
List-loving Forbes has just figured out which airports around the world are the most punctual. They checked into the 50 busiest airports and then looked at their on-time arrival and departure data to figure out who's on top.
The moral of their story is that if you want your plane to leave on time, fly out of Tokyo. Haneda and Narita airports hold the top two spots: At Haneda, 93 percent of flights departed within 15 minutes of the planned time and 87 percent arrived on time. We know Japan well, so this result doesn't surprise us--but it does impress us.
A little surprisingly, the laid back Aussies come in fourth with Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport; the organized Germans get their first rating in the ninth spot with Munich. An airport we consider a big mover on the international scene, Dubai International, came in a disappointing 49th.
Stateside, Orlando was the most punctual (8th) with Houston's George Bush Intercontinental close behind (10th). The US also gets the wooden spoon with LaGuardia coming in last.
It's a well-known fact that the minute you mention a "secret" anything in the travel media, people lap it up. So we couldn't help but be taken by Seth Kugel's latest piece in The New York Times that reveals some of the little-seen and, yep, "hidden" treasures in NYC's museums.
At MoMA, the playful "Water Tower" high above the museum's sculpture garden is the thing to watch for. An official explains its appeal:
The water towers of New York are proverbial, they're vernacular, they're on every building, it seems. Casting it in this translucent resin, it's as if the wooden parts of the water tower have fallen away and what you have is an almost icelike object. For me it truly became a magical piece when I saw the sun coming through it; it really glows.
We don't know if that one piece is worth the $20 admission charge, so if you're feeling cheap, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (with its "suggested admission") is the place to go for secret art.
The South Asian galleries there are rarely visited, Kugel says, because they're so hard to find. Following his excellent directions, though, you'll suss 'em out and enjoy an uncrowded journey through the entire artistic history of the region. No wonder we all love secrets.
We're willing to look past the fact that you still haven't gotten to the greens in Vietnam. But the, ahem, forefront of the golf scene is no longer Southeast Asia. To truly impress your buddies, book those clubs through to Kashmir.
There are already four courses in the region, and a fifth is set to open this year. Says The New York Times:
The golf-loving chief minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, Ghulam Nabi Azad, has spoken of his desire to see the region become an "international golfing hub."
"There is a need to mobilize golfers across the world to come and play the game here," he told reporters recently, in something of an understatement.
It would probably help if the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office didn't warn "against all travel to, or through rural areas of Jammu and Kashmir other than Ladakh." After all, says the Director of Tourism for Kashmir:
People are going to Sri Lanka. People are going to Israel and Lebanon. But why not Kashmir? It's safer here than New York...In 18 years of trouble, we have had only 25 tourist victims.
Budget Travel caught our attention last year with a baby blog. Now, 730 posts later, it's finally gotten a much-needed makeover.
Blog editor Sean O'Neill filled us in on the changes:
We've added a search box, and you can now click through by month or topic or author, to find older posts...We also decided to add profile pages for our authors.
We had noticed that other great blogs, such as the LA Times Daily Deal blog, had succeeded in highlighting how their blogs are written by fun, flesh-and-blood people, instead of being--I don't know how to say this--cold and impersonal voices-from-on-high.
And this isn't the only web project the magazine has going. Its spin-off title, Girlfriend Getaways, will get its own dedicated site this week. As of now, the launch is slated for Tuesday.
Got all your pranks ready for tomorrow? April Fool's Day promises to be a lackluster attempt at humor throughout the travel media. If last year is any indication, Gadling will be leading the charge with a full day of fabricated travel news.
Hopefully they can come up with something a little more funny than Airbus puns. Humph. We'll see. Also possible are some Chris Elliott yuks about airlines actually helping out consumers instead of infuriating them.
