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You’re waiting in the dentist’s office, perusing the newsstand, or surfing through your RSS reader and you can’t help but be drawn in to the headlines:
This Year’s It List!
Our Hot List Issue!
The Hot Spots for 2011!
Where to Travel This Year!
It’s a tactic as old as magazines themselves and it’ll probably persist long after I’m dead and gone, when we’re reading our info on hovering holograms that follow us around the house.
The problem is, it’s mostly b.s.
These headlines sell magazines, they generate clicks, they are a great way to generate some press for the publication. The important reason to do them though, the one you’ll never see discussed in the editor’s intro, is that these lists create a whole new batch of advertising targets for the sales reps to go call on.
“Congrats, you’re going to be in our upcoming ‘Hotels so hot we can barely set foot in them’ issue! And I’ve got a 1/4-page spot reserved for you right before your destination’s section. Just 12 grand and we’ll also give you 50,000 pop-up ad impressions on our annoying website for free!”
I’ve spent close to two decades now reviewing hotels. If I had five bucks for every hotel that appeared in these issues before going out of business a few years later, I could take off the month of April.
As for the “hot place to go this year,” there’s an uncanny correlation between where a new luxury hotel has just opened and what destination is now supposedly the place to be. A new Aman Resort or Ritz-Carlton? It’s hot. That’s why, despite all the crime, traffic, pollution, and general ugliness, Travel & Leisure will gush about Acapulco. Some fancy new hotels opened there, hotels like Banyan Tree that have plenty of ad money to spend. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be touching it with a 1,000-foot pole.
Here’s one thing you can count on for real: if you see a place showing up in these articles over and over for a few years running, you can bet the big money crowd will soon be following the shepherds’ calls. It’s the main reason prices have risen so dramatically in Essaouira, Istanbul, Prague, Tallin, Siem Reap, Krabi, and other places that used to be backpacker haunts. It’s been happening fast lately in Peru’s Sacred Valley, Cartegeña, and Hoi An.
There’s no fighting and you can’t hide, but you can ignore the sheep and chart your own path.
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