The travel sections of several leading American newspapers seem to engage in an alternating pattern of reality/non-reality. For months on end, they devote their pages to recommending ultra-deluxe hotels that no normal American could possibly afford, and then--when called out by critics--they spend a week or two on realistic expenditures before reverting to their normal, desired areas of glamour and luxury.
Nothing better illustrates this than the front page of this past Sunday’s New York Times travel section on July 12, 2015, in an article covering that entire front page, with more inside, entitled “The Best Days of Our Lives”. In it, the Times provides a chilling example of the tendency of most travel journalists (in both print media and the internet) to salivate over the rich, composing dreams of no possible usefulness to the great majority of the American public.
In “The Best Days of our Lives”, the Times describes the desire of an ordinary young American couple to enjoy a three-week honeymoon in Italy, “the most romantic country in the world”.
Their trip would begin in Venice, go on to Tuscany, and end in Sicily. In several thousands of words describing all the facilities they used (hotels, restaurants, rental car). the article never once mentions the cost of any one of these facilities (other than a single reference to a $3 glass of wine, on one isolated occasion).
So did our typical American couple land at the airport of Venice and then take a public motorboat to their hotel, like almost all normal tourists do? You bet they didn’t! Their travel agent, who arranged the entire honeymoon, had ordered a private motorboat and hotel official to meet them and whisk them romantically to the ultra-deluxe Belmond Cipriani Hotel, one of the most expensive lodgings in all of Italy, the place where George Clooney had his recent wedding.
The New York Times fails to mention that although the Cipriani is sometimes slightly “discounted” by hotel “aggregators”, its standard rates go up to $1,600 per room per night (“Double Room St. Mark’s View”} and to $2,200 per night per suite. What a normal honeymoon!
From Venice, our honeymoon couple travels by train into Tuscany, where they rent a car for further touring. But do they simply go to Auto Europe, Hertz or Avis for that transportation? No, their travel agent has apparently booked them with a company called Zephyrus Classic Car Rental, so they can tootle along the roads outside of Florence in a glamorous 1981 Fiat Spider Open Air Convertible, for which the newly-wed husband is given gloves to wear and his wife a dranatic scarf. You can imagine how economical that car rental was (the New York Times spares us the details).
There follows one deluxe hotel and historic “manor house” stay after another, like the Palazzo Avino in Ravello, whose rates often approach $600 per room per night. And though one of two other hotels used by our prototypical couple charge a “budget-level” $340 a night per room, those appear to be a case of occasionally slumming it. The couples’ restaurant choices are similarly select, consisting always of top-ranked Italian prize-winners..
Though it’s impossible to estimate the total cost of this three-week honeymoom, given the Times’ refusal to cite actual expenditures, I’d say that $30,000 (including air fare to Italy) is a conservative stab at doing so. And the actual tab might even have been higher.
How many American couples are able to spend $30,000 for a honeymoon? How realistic is it of the New York Times to describe such a fling in an article meant to encourage other honeymoon couples to consider a similar blow-out, Italian-style.
The appearance of such travel advice in a respected newspaper is bad enough. But it is equally discouraging to realize that last Sunday’s lyrical travel piece about a glamorous Italian vacation is typical of many other such fantasies appearing in big and prominent journals.
Photo credit: nickodoherty/Flickr