Travel Weekly Blog

Tim Leffel points to a very-few-holds-barred assault on modern tourism in the Washington Post. A flavour:

Global tourism is ... nothing short of a planet-threatening plague. It's polluting land and sea, destroying wildlife and natural habitat and depleting energy and natural resources. Look-alike resorts and spas are replacing and undermining local culture...

But writer Elizabeth Becker does have some kind words, pointing approvingly to the National Trust's tourist rentals and 'community-based tourism' in Namibia.

Our writer Ian Taylor (who also blogs) visited a community tourism project in Thailand earlier this year, and came away impressed.

Anyway, Leffel widens Becker's piece into an indictment of travel journalism:

When is the last time you saw a destination exposed for the bad experience it really is in a major travel magazine? What's the ratio of positive cruising stories to the ones that examine the destruction caused by the industry and its passengers?

Some TW staff took part in a related discussion on the ethics of travel writing over on Adam Tinworth's One Man And His Blog recently (Adam is head of blogging at our publisher RBI).

Plenty to chew on here...