‘These Are Strange Times to be a Travel Editor’

Read many U.S. newspaper travel sections these days and you get the sense that their editors are living in a first-class, four-star fantasy world where there is no war but only sunny vacations in Hawaii, new museum openings and, stop the presses, wonderfully cheap flights to London. Many of these sections are publishing the same holiday stories they would be at any other time, without even a hint of an acknowledgement that their readers, having just read about the latest war casualties on the front page, might not feel like whooping it up in Cancun. Perhaps they believe that their papers’ news sections offer more than enough war coverage and their job is simply to offer escape. Perhaps the economic apparatus that keeps travel sections afloat requires an unwavering message: Go. No matter what is happening in the world, go. Whatever the case, in perusing the Sunday travel sections online, I was happy to find South Florida Sun-Sentinel Travel Editor Thomas Swick’s column. He’s one of the few editors willing to acknowledge that we readers might not all be itching to go on vacation at the moment.

“These are strange times to be a travel editor,” he writes. “Lately, our diligent dedication to rosy mobility has hit a rough spell, what with the threat of terrorism, growing anti-Americanism, and the buildup to war. Surveys keep showing that Americans are reluctant to travel now, especially abroad…” Swick recognizes that sometimes, as he puts it, “When your country is fighting you are in no mood for pleasure.” So what to make of his travel section? “[O]n a Sunday morning, the Travel section arrives,” he writes. “It cannot do otherwise. Rain or shine. War or peace. It, too, seems out of place, but in a strange way comforting. All those people still seeing wonders and savoring moments.” As a reader in these dark times, this is all I really want: a little humanity—a little reality—on the travel pages. Give me that and I can even live with a few sunny Hawaii stories.

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