Commentary

Travel Savvy

Whether gazing at butterflies or enduring the vulgar spectacle of "The Swan," I'm fascinated by before-and-after transformations. So when the Travel Savvy folks sent along their newly spiffy September/October issue along with copies of pre-redesign older ones, I decided to size them up with the practiced snobbery of Simon Cowell at a fourth-grade vocal showcase.

So let's see. On the cover, the Travel Savvy moniker now gets the tilty italics treatment, while "Lists That Matter" replaces "Setting the Trend" as a handy tag line. The mag showcases both more and more disparate celebrities: Damon Dash, Tony Hawk, the preggo "Lost" chick. "Buzz" and "Arrivals" have phased out "Perspectives" as front-of-book fodder, the mag's designers have discovered non-primary colors, and features seem mostly to be capped at the five-page mark.

So yeah, Travel Savvy is a cleaner-looking and more topically diverse magazine than it was a few months ago. Whether it's any good, however, remains up for debate.

In a rather bold decision for a travel pub, Travel Savvy has ditched the flowery and aimless travelogues ("oh, Venice, you embrace me with your canalitudinousness!") that once littered its pages. In their place: lists and lots of 'em. Editor-in-Chief Jill Brooke explains the strategy thusly: "Instead of hiring writers to parachute into a place and document their observations, we visit acclaimed experts who share their knowledge and acumen with us."

Okay, sounds promising in theory. So we're treated to the president of the Romance Writers of America sharing her five best locales to fall in love, "Commissioner of Tailgating" Joe Cahn listing his top 10 parking lots, and the editor of Watch Time noting the five most luxurious watches for men. What purpose that last piece serves in a travel magazine, of course, is anybody's guess.

The gimmick produces its share of interesting fare, most notably the lists of hotels for finicky eaters and best places for prince-spotting in London, but ultimately that's all it is: a gimmick, and one that gets tiresome pretty quickly. I mean, the "six best hotels to have an affair"? What do you need besides a "do not disturb" placard and a room-service menu?

More troubling are the corners Travel Savvy seems to have cut with the switch to the list format. With few bylined stories and a noticeable dip in exclusive photography (a majority of the pics look like they've been plucked from travel brochures), the publication feels kinda cheap, as if the format switch was motivated more by budget concerns than by a genuine desire to better serve readers. There are exceptions, notably a blurred photo of a foliage-engulfed country road that boasts an almost impressionist feel to it, but not enough of them to break the monotony.

Travel Savvy's slight tonal shift also comes across as somewhat forced. Props to the mag for attempting to be a bit more risque - as opposed to most travel publications, in which glimpses of epidermis are as rare as the manatee. I just don't see the point of showing a hint of tush in, of all places, a featurette on the 10 most opulent bags of the season. And as fetching as editor Brooke may be, the smidgen of cleavage in the glam shot that accompanies her column doesn't do a whole lot to affirm her credibility.

Maybe Travel Savvy deserves a mulligan for the September/October issue. Few design/format overhauls work right out of the box, after all, and there are occasional flourishes of inspiration here. I just think that readers want more from a travel mag; they've come to expect luxe layouts and cardboard-thick pages. Just as nobody wants to vacation in a grubby motor inn, nobody wants to read a magazine that feels like it was produced on the cheap. Until Travel Savvy addresses that perception, it will likely find itself relegated to the publishing world equivalent of steerage.

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