TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 21

Steves, Anthony Bourdain and Rudy Maxa are not only travel gurus for consumers but
can be critical of the industry. Among daily newspapers, the Miami Herald has a beat in
the Business section dedicated to the industry, thanks in part to Tom Fiedler, one of the
few newspaper editors who routinely covered tourism as a major industry, not simply as a
pastime or lifestyle. First as a reporter and then as executive editor of the Herald , Fiedler
watched the tourism industry transform Florida, and not always for the better. When he
became the newspaper's executive editor, Fiedler created the tourism beat and assigned
Douglas Hanks III to cover Florida's $50 billion industry.
As the Miami Herald tourism reporter, Hanks routinely wrote about the extraordinary
power of the Florida tourism industry, including its successful lobbying to prevent Florida
schools from lengthening the school year by shortening summer vacation—a change that
would have prevented high school students from working the entire summer tourist sea-
son. Hanks wrote about the tourism board's iron-clad influence over development, taxes
and other issues that the industry fears might cut into tourism to the “Sunshine State.”
He interviewed British travel writers eating lobster bisque at an upscale South Beach res-
taurant on a free vacation organized by the Greater Miami tourism board, which gives
away three hundred trips a year that include free meals at Miami restaurants and free hotel
rooms. The publicist for one of these restaurants told Hanks that giving travel writers free
meals was the only marketing she did. It was much more effective and much cheaper than
old-fashioned advertising.
However, Jane Wooldridge, the former Miami Herald travel editor and now the news-
paper's business editor, said she often ignored the newspaper's strict prohibition against ac-
cepting freelance journalist articles if those pieces were based on travels subsidized by the
industry. She said she had to fill her section and didn't want to depend solely on wealthy
writers who paid their own way. “It's a pile of crap that we're all pure,” she said.
Fiedler, now the dean of the College of Communications at Boston University, said
the line between a tourist pamphlet and a travel piece is far too fuzzy. He blamed the ex-
traordinary amount of advertising revenue newspapers earn from the tourism industry. “I
don't know if it's a cultural mindset that takes hold so you only write good news stories,”
he told me. “If you were looking at it cynically, it is a conspiracy of silence.”
Travel writing and its refusal to treat the industry seriously can take some of the blame
for tourism's frivolous reputation.
• • •
The final anomaly is the central role of government. Tourism is that rare industry whose
“product” is a country. Travelers first decide what countries to visit, and then what city, re-
gion, beach resort or historic site. And all travelers to foreign lands must pass through bor-