Welcome to Swagland
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 01.19.05 | 10:05 PM ET
It’s not a destination, but “a wondrous alternate universe concocted by publicists, funded by corporations eager for media coverage of their wares and frequented by journalists who have cast off concerns about conflicts of interest and embraced a new creed of conspicuous consumption,” writes Los Angeles Times magazine. And who are some of the major visitors to Swagland? Travel writers. Weddle offers an uncommonly deep examination of swag—an acronym for “stolen without a gun” or “sh*t we all get”—with a special nod to the travel junket. “The junket gives travel bureaus, resorts and hotels the biggest bang for their buck, far more than they could get by taking out ads in major magazines or newspapers,” he writes. “Full-page ads in national magazines run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. In contrast, it might cost a grand to fly a writer to a hotel or resort for a weekend junket, and the results are far more effective.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
