Travelblather

After a screw up that could only happen on the British Railway network at Christmas when engineering works overran by four days causing misery to train travellers, the rail regulator has dished out a record £14m fine to the business that looks after the network - Network Rail. All well and good. But I've never worked out with these fines by regulators - where does the money go? My guess it disappears into a government coffer or else goes to fund the work of the regulator... not much good for the passengers is it? Surely there should be a fund created for passengers to seek compensation from at least a portion of this cash and the rest should be put into a separate fund for improvements to the network above and beyond those that were previously planned. As a rail user I couldn't care less if the regulator fines network rail £14m or £14billion... it makes no difference to the quality of my journey. Or maybe it makes it WORSE? Network Rail is a not-for-profit organisation... that £14million could be coming out of the pot that's there to pay for improvements... so the greater the fine, the worse off the rail users will be...

I got an invite to a press trip to South Africa yesterday. It looked very tempting. Everything paid for. But as always with travel press trips the itinerary was jammed - Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa in the space of 3 days. How is anyone supposed to take away anything meaningful from such a whirlwind of experiences? As a freelance I need one or two strong themes and depth, not breadth.

As soon as you get on a plane on a press trip you are fair game to everyone who has had a role in hosting you - every restaurant who feeds you, each hotel that accommodates you, every ground handler that looks after you. A chaos of voices all trying to get your attention...

Maybe if you work on a travel desk at a newspaper you can crowbar lots of mentions for all these different people into a series of bits and pieces, but as a freelance it's hopeless. By about day 2 of one of these trips you are so overloaded with info you don't want to see another rep from somewhere else telling you about how great their product is... You also don't want any of the other journos on the trip too close to you in case they see the same angle you see and write about it too... You're gagging for a bit of free space with no one else around so you can get on with the job of watching and thinking and writing...

It's a shame as press trips are quite social and thus good fun... going solo as I tend to do is solitary and sometimes lonely. But to generate great copy that is unique and compelling press trips are a waste of time and that's just the way it goes...

I don't know whether to feel sorry for Max Gogarty or not... A young 19 year old gets the dream commission - a blog about his gap-year travels on the website of one of the UK's biggest national newspapers - The Guardian Only problem is... his dad is a regular writer for the Guardian too... And to be honest, Max's writing is rather cliched (not that surprising for a 19 year old I guess?)

The first post on his blog attracted some of the most withering criticism I've read in ages... (The blog has now been taken down at Max's request). Just one example...

"Here's an idea, Max.

I really like ABTN. It started life as a quirky weekly text based email newsletter about the airline industry by Malcolm Ginsberg who really knows his stuff about the industry. He offered a once-weekly dollop of bits and pieces from which I found many a news story. It did the job very nicely - news and views and nothing else. Then it got bought by Centaur Media and suddenly we got HTML emails with pics and other guff. Just this week I got my 'Mid-Week Update'. I didn't request it. I was quite happy with things the way they were. I actually READ the damn thing once a week... and my in-box like everyone else's is always stuffed with PR guff... Shame eh? The very value of the concept - small and perfectly formed - looks like being skuttled by a big publisher who just wants to 'maximise the value for its shareholders'... Doubtless daily updates will follow... where will it end? Hourly?

I just came across a new video-based website called tripr.tv It made me shudder. The idea is that anyone who fancies being an 'independent video author' can dig out their handycam, film a sequence about a hotel and post it. If someone books the hotel as a result of watching the video the 'independent video author' gets a cut of the commission. God, can it get any worse?

Like seriously, is anyone going to book the Ritz Carlton in Miami as a result of Bob's wonky handheld home video and his husky built-in mic voiceover ('The beds are really nice. The bathroom is really.... err nice. The view is really umm... nice)? If anything they'll do the opposite. All the hotel chain's hard efforts to create a brand and product that suggests luxury, attention to detail and quality are completely pole-axed by some random bloke with his holiday movie. It's hosted on YouTube so the compression quality is awful too. It ought to be funny... But there's a very serious point here for anyone who is running a tour company or hotel... 

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