“Burble” for airline
p. 60 · Read in the full issue
airline
Of all the organisations devoted to the dollar, the travel business surely contains the greatest number of phonies and freeloaders. “Travel consul tants”, many of them pimply faced adolescents whose understanding of the world is limited to IATA-approved ticket writing, regularly invade the South Seas in self-protecting groups, seeing the “Pacific lifes tyles” from the air-conditioned sterility of their Travelodge or Intercontinental and return to their offices in Sydney or Auck land, if anything even less well informed than when they left them. “Travel” runs the old saw, “broadens the mind”. This must certainly be so when there are minds to be broadened, but the sheer mindlessness of “familiarisation” tours and of the people who undertake them gives the lie to even that
adage.
These thoughts have their immediate inspiration in the picture in PlM’s August issue (p5B) of another bunch of übiquitous freebees the “travel writers”. We learn from the gushing two-column item that the personalities outside a Samoan fale, cups of cocoa in hand, are Australia’s “top travel writers”, though the picture’s caption identifies them more accurately as a group of Austra lian journalists. We should therefore be more precise with our expressions. Paul Theroux is a travel writer. So was the late Eric Newby. None of the per sons pictured, to my mind, can claim to be such in the same sense.
It really is high time these exercises in self-indulgence, en couraged by airlines and de partments of tourism, were closely scrutinised for the time and money-wasting junkets they are. Their effect is illus trated less in the publication of useful information than in the ever increasing prices of air tickets and package tours to the islands. It is after all the poor put-upon consumer the tourist who ultimately foots the bill for the free vacations of the Peaches and Gallegos; for Australians close to SAIOOO for a week in Apia at Aggie Grey’s, and without the cheering cup of Samoan cocoa thrown in.
Aggie herself was in Auck land. How could she have been so thoughtless as to be out of town while the “travel writers” were there? Or is she as tired of entertaining these creeps as I have become of reading about them? Young Aggie, of course, charmed everyone, but it’s so much easier to be charmed when you’re not picking up the tab.
Perhaps worst of all is the fact that this burble, nothing more than a publicity sheet from Polynesian Airlines, has been swallowed whole by PIM and regurgitated as a news item in the Tropicalities section. Really, you guys! The item might have been appropriate in Tusitala (Polynesian’s inflight magazine) but in PIM it is nothing more than an inadequate space filler and an affront to your readers’ intelligence.
Lautoka Fiji