newelty

Budget Travel, I want to love you. I have subscribed to your magazine for years. I love your mission of inexpensive travel, and I do believe that you fulfill a good purpose. You’re like the scrappy cousin of the hoity-toity fancies at Travel + Leisure, the Nick Carraway to their Great Gatsby. So please take this fail ‘o’ the day in the spirit it is given–to try to make your mag better, faster.

Your Reader Tips section is the worst. It’s a mix of un-eco buy-this-at-a-dollar-store-in-Hawaii advice, mixed with Reader’s Digest style inanity. In short, it’s Boomers Gone Wild, and they are inordinately preoccupied with pickpockets, plastic bags, and preventing moisture damage. Please stop encouraging them. To wit, some examples from this month’s issue. Each of these are from individual writers, but I don’t want to list their names–I’m too embarrassed for them.

“Talcum powder…full-size bottles are too bulky to fit in my suitcase. Instead, I fill up an herb jar.”

May I recommend an incredible new invention called the travel-sized item?

“Luggage tags with zippers are great for carrying credit cards and cash. Just fasten one to your belt loop, tuck it under your waist band and inside your pants.”

Let’s just set aside the horror of the French shopkeeper as you reach into your sweaty waistband to pull out your cash. Instead, I’m going to think about the Thai waitress who assumes that all Americans don’t understand what a luggage tag is. Please stop.

“I like to collect silica gel packs…[and] when I travel to humid locations, tuck them into Ziplock bags with my camera…no moisture problems yet!”

Have you considered not locking your camera into a plastic bag in the first place?

“I always bring a Polaroid PoGo instant mobile printer…whenever I give someone my business card, I print a picture of myself on adhesive Zink photo paper and attach it to the back of my card.”

“Hold on a minute, please. I’m just going to take this picture of myself, pull out my travel printer, and affix this to the card.” Awkward 10 minutes follow, when the card recipient wishes she had stayed in her hotel room. Also, they make cards now you can get at home with your photo already on them. Some items shouldn’t be travel-sized–like printers.

“Before I go traveling with my laptop, I download product manuals….Not only can I leave the bulky instruction books at home, but I never have to leaf through reams of paper.”

Two things. You read product manuals? And take them with you on trips? Really?

Budget Travel, these posts diminish your brand. They make me think you don’t understand modern travel, and are instead are most interested serving the same group of people scared to leave their house for the pickpocketing wilds of Paris.

One small other tidbit: The piece this month on the Oregon Coast was just lazy. The writer stopped in a crab shack, and then he popped in a couple shops in Manzanita and Cannon Beach.

From the way it was written, it seems as thought he never made it past the lot at Oswald West State Park (“when I arrived, surfers were wrapping up a midday session tugging off hoods and wetsuits”–no description of the trails, protected cove, or tidal pools that you’d see from the beach itself). Oswald West has gotten crowded anyway, so I guess that’s a good thing. But a write-up of the Oregon Coast should include details about hikes, places to stay, and the beaches themselves, not just ruminations of how it’s changed since the author was there last.

I’m worried about you, Budget Travel. In an era where guidebooks are becoming ever-less relevant compared to social media, a print magazine needs to be fantastic, inventive, and innovative. It needs to have advice and tips that apply to us, the modern travel set, not to the crazy people who carry everything in their bag in a ziplock, and not to the lazy, indulgent writers who want to ruminate about their own childhoods instead of offering advice.

Please get better soon. We really are fond of you, and want you to survive the Great Recession.