mrkstvns's Full Review: International Travel News Magazine
The mailman brought me a little gift the other day: a sample issue of ITN: International Travel News. And ya know what? If someone had sent me a free case of ice cold beer, I couldn't have been more pleased. (Well, maybe just a little more pleased....)
I'd heard about this rag before, strictly by word of mouth, but I've never actually seen it and gotten a chance to flip through it and actually read the thing before. Now I see what I've been missing....
International Travel News is very, VERY different from any other travel publication on the newsstands today. It's lower key, broader minded, and extremely well focused. It has a powerful sense of community, and it has excellent content that's useful, insightful, provocative, and that makes me want to hop on a plane right this very instant!
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer Holder...
Let's be honest here. ITN is one ugly magazine. Big, fat, butt-UGly...yep...that's a capital UGGHH!
With its cheesy newsprint, wafer thin paper stock, unadorned graphic style, and total front-to-back pure black and white color scheme, this magazine is an unashamed antithesis to those high-dollar, overproduced, slick "lifestyle" travel magazines that clutter newsstands.
When you don't have color glossy photos of bikini-clad supermodels lying on the decks of luxury cruise ships, you better have some serious substance. And that, my friends, is the point of ITN. This is a magazine that doesn't care about glitz and fashion and marketing slickery. This is a magazine of pure, raw, unadulterated SUBSTANCE.
Even the Ads Are Fun to Read...
These days, when I get an issue of Condy Nasty Traveler or Travel + Leisure, it seems like I spend a good half hour tearing out all the superfluous irrelevant ads for Chryslers, Gray Goose Vodka, Luxo-Loom Silk underwear, Stanley garage door openers, Rolex watches, and every other piece of trashy overpriced junk that a marketer could possibly be paid to hawk. By the time I'm done tearing, I'm down to a thin 20-page almost readable magazine.
I hate stupid, irrelevant ads for stuff I couldn't care less about.
The folks who edit ITN must be folks like me! (Smart, not too cantankerous, witty, a bit balding perhaps, but still very sensuous, and probably drinking a cool Old Rasputin Stout).
EVERY SINGLE ad in this magazine is 100 PERCENT COOL and TOTALLY RELEVANT!
The last time a miracle of this magnitude occurred, wise men showed up bearing gifts of gold, frankinsence, and beer.
Heck, the ads are almost more fun to read than the articles! There's ads for train expeditions through China, freighter cruises, tours to Mayan temples, a jungle trek through the Amazon rainforest, a safari in Kenya, even a "South African culinary adventure" (I didn't even know they had cuisine in South Africa! Most of the ads from smaller, very focused, often culturally or ecologically aware tour operators that focus on niche areas.
Not only are there no ads for cars, perfume, watches, or marital aids, there are not even schlock ads for mediocre destinations and overblown, artificial, lame-brain, totally superficial mega travel destinations (which, in order to protect the innocent, I will identify only as DisneyWorld and Las Vegas). Nor are there any ads for only marginally travel-related services.
Total focus.
The layout is so intelligently done and the ads so well integrated with the content that ads appear close to closely related articles. Example: This issue has an article about crossing the River Kwai on a rail journey across Thailand. (Fascinating yarn!) On the same and nearby pages are ads for companies providing tours in or air travel to Thailand, China, and other destinations in that region. A column about travel medicine has an ad on its page for a company selling travel medical insurance. An article about celebrating Christmas in Russia includes a big ad for Black Sea - Kiev cruises on the luxury ship M/S Peter the Great (Wow! 2-week cruises and prices start at just $1498? Sounds like a heck of a deal! Maybe I'm going to have mouse click my way over to www.cruise-russ.com and see what these guys are all about....)
These are just a few examples. There are lots more where these came from....hundreds of ideas for interesting and very high quality traveling. No schlock. No Disney. Just genuine culture, genuine nature, and genuine eye-opening experiences. Gourmet tours, eco tours, safaris, adventure tours, intellectual tours. A few ads: 8 days diving the reefs of Belize for less than $1,000. An architectural tour of Gaudi's Barcelona. Take a freighter through the French Polynesian islands. Charter a private rail car for a train trek across Siberia. Do a 19-day slow-boat trip in the Upper Amazon. Get a custom trek into the Tibetan Himalayas. Everywhere I look, there are more ads for fascinating trips than I could ever find time to do, even if my wallet did bulge enough to pay for 'em all.
Think Globally, Act Globally...
One of the coolest things about ITN is that the emphasis is on the I. This is an INTERNATIONAL travel magazine --- a magazine that revels in the kinds of cultural experiences that are ONLY experienced by folks who get out of the house once in a while.
The magazine makes absolutely no pretense about serving the unwashed masses. If you don't have a well-worn passport in your pocket, this magazine will NOT appeal to you. The magazine states right up front that they do not cover anything related to travel within the U.S. or Canada. In fact, there's a little discussion blurb in there where they state that in coming issues, they won't cover the Caribbean either.
I think that's good. Why travel if you only like things that are exactly like they are at home?
The only caution I have for some of y'all is to beware because you might never settle for another silly money-wasting trip to some Disney theme park again. Not when the world is so FULL of truly amazing experiences that can often be done for LESS MONEY.
Read this magazine, and you'll start saying "screw a bunch of waiting forever in never-moving ride lines, paying too much for unhealthy junk food, and standing around waiting to shake hands with some doofus I don't even know just because he's wearing a mouse costume"! Nope. You'll want to go trekking into the Andean mountains to touch the halls where real Incan kings once reigned --- not just looking at some stupid replica of a model used for Emperors New Groove.
Content is King...
There is a lot of very good information here.
The articles are often first-person narratives about recent trips. They talk specifics, not just glittering generalities. They tell you what hotels they stayed in, what service providers had problems, where service was exceptionally good (or exceptionally bad, whatever the case may be). It's personal experience though, much like what you find in some of the better Epinion travel reviews here.
I love the articles, but I really find nuggets of gold in all those columns.
I had no idea that the water on airplanes could be so nasty (next time, I'll be bringing my own bottled water in the carry-on). One column in the November 2004 issue mentioned that EPA inspectors found tainted water on about 12 percent of the commercial aircraft they inspected, 2/3 of the infractions on U.S. flag carriers. 2 of the aircraft were found to have E. Coli in their water tanks. Nasty dude! Get the Moctezuma's revenge without even having the benefit of a Mexican vacation.....Nasty.
Here's a great little nugget gleaned from one column: Did you know that the government has a web site that will show you how much time you should expect to spend standing in line at an airport security checkpoint? They do! Check it out at: waittime.tsa.dhs.gov
Good info! Usable info! That's what I'm talkin' about!
A Sense of Community... ITN seems to do something that's very elusive in the publications world: they seem to actually manage to build and hold on to a sense of genuine community. People who read ITN seem to be loyal readers, and to look to each other for guidance and support. It's kind of what you find in certain enthusiast web sites, but rarely in generalist web sites.
ITN does it by having several different exchange-style columns. There's one called "Travelers Intercom" that lets subscribers (and only subscribers....gotta weed out the riff-raff, ya know) tell other readers about the good, the bad, and the ugly. Thumbs up? Tell folks here! Heads up? Tell 'em here too...
They also have a place where subscribers can write in for help resolving travel issues, be it an airline that doesn't want to cut a refund for a cancelled flight or a travel insurance provider who doesn't want to pay up just because a hurricane destroyed the hotel that was booked.
One of the most fun ideas is what they call "Person to Person". People can essentially put in a classified ad telling everyone else where they're going and asking for comments. It's just like what you find in the Talk forum on Fodors! "Just booked my ticket on the Orient Express. Would like to hear your experiences and any advice. Send email to bogusman@tiogringo.com".
Naturally, some of the articles are also reader-written, which can sometimes be a double-edged sword because you don't always get a professionally criticial viewpoint or professional quality prose. In this case, ITN seems to do a good job separating the wheat from the chaff and just serving up the good stuff to the readers. I looked at some of their past articles out on their web site (www.intltravelnews.com), and generally, their quality seems very good for a niche type publication.
Some People Just DO NOT Belong...
Supposedly only 20 percent of Americans have passports and less than 2 percent actually use a passport in any given year. I'd further wager that at least half those folks are either just doing a business trip or are otherwise not traveling for enjoyment. That means about 99 percent of y'all probably shouldn't be reading International Travel News.
Travel is glamorous, which is why you find all those glossy magazines with bright beautiful covers and stuffed with ads for Rolex watches and Lincoln Navigators. But most people who really love to travel are more likely to have a bogus Rolex they bought in Bogota for $6 than the genuine, overpriced, article (I know I saved about $1,000 on my "Rolex" --- glad I did too!)
If you are in that 1 percent of travelers who love traveling outside the comfortable zone of home, and your Rolex is as fake as mine, you are probably exactly the kind of person who should be reading ITN. But then, you probably already knew that...
I don't know who gave my name and address to ITN, but I owe that person a beer! I'm subscribing right now! If you think ITN might be the kind of magazine for you, you can get a free issue and check it out for yourself, just go to their web site (www.intltravelnews.com) and prowl around --- you'll find the online request form, and if you don't, just email your name and mailing address to: info@intltravelnews.com or give 'em a call at 1-800-ITN-4-YOU
The magazine looks cheesy as hell, but damn! It makes for some FINE reading!
Until next time, see you on the road. Maybe I'll be taking a trip that I found out about by reading International Travel News.
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