Press: Telling Readers Where to Go

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First, never leave home without a golf ball. It will fit the drain in the vast majority of the world's hotel sinks that come without a plug. Also, start filling the tub immediately if you hear gunshots. One of the things that goes first and fast in insurrections and civil wars is the water supply. But travel is not all grim. When in Bali, do not pass up the free-lance masseuses on Kuta Beach. And if you happen into Peshawar, make straight for Salateen's and try the leg of lamb, "a treat of international renown."

Such is the advice from Trips, which premiered on newsstands last week, pledging that it is for "those who are weary of travel magazines and wary of their authority." By now the reading public may be wearier and warier than ever, since in the past seven months three major new magazines have shoved into an already crowded baggage rack full of travel publications. If there is a common theme to the new celebrators of get-up-and-go, it is that tourists are to be despised but travelers are to be exalted. The magazines, of course, promise to reveal the difference.

The other common theme is that there is money to be made telling people where to go. The idea is not new. Several U.S. periodicals devoted to the journeying reader emerged at the turn of the century, including the forefather of what is today's Travel-Holiday, owned by the Reader's Digest. That magazine now has a circulation of 800,000 and remains a sedate, middlebrow Howard Johnson's sort of enterprise. The new action is exemplified by the current industry leader, American Express's upscale Travel & Leisure, a 17-year-old that is still growing briskly, with a circulation of 1.1 million and advertising revenues of $39.5 million. The host of followers has been drawn by the decade-long boom in the U.S. travel industry. This year Americans heading abroad are expected to lay out $32.9 billion (up 14% despite the unfavorable exchange rate in many countries), and close to ten times that amount will be spent on domestic trips. Only food and cars get a bigger wedge out of the U.S. consumers' wallet.

The first of the newcomer flock arrived in 1985 with European Travel & Life, an album of life-styles of the rich and shameless now owned by Rupert Murdoch. Writers scout the perfect half-timbered inns of Normandy, poke into isolated Sardinian coves, or try for par on a Scottish golf course. Most issues include pictures of food you can smell off the page. "We take you to places you wouldn't see," explains Editor in Chief David Breul, "and introduce you to people you wouldn't meet." There seems to be no shortage of vicarious voyagers: circulation has risen 70%, to 290,000 in the past year.

At the other end of the market, for people with less time to plan and less money to spend, Fairchild Publications offers Travel Today!, which debuted this winter on East Coast newsstands as an instant, if uncritical, source of news on cheap airfares, hotel rates, package tours and where to spend a long weekend just about anyplace in the world. With its short deadline and weekly frequency, the magazine sacrifices some of the gloss common in the field in order to have the latest information for the fast-growing ranks of short-trip takers and long weekenders.