The truth about so-called British ‘experts’ on Greek islands (hint: it’s not pretty)
Watch out for those pushy know-it-all Brits who actually know frighteningly little
As we close in on the Easter holidays🐇that means one thing: the start of the annual Internet regurgitation of articles by “experts” about the six secret Greek islands (that aren’t secret at all) that you must visit, or the fancy resort that will redefine (but it won’t) island X, or the…you get the point.
But oh, the British.
We cannot forget the sight of some British gal berating a server at a fancy hotel in Mykonos because she didn’t get her eggs exactly the way she claimed to have ordered them.
That British mentality — superior, stubborn, parsimonious — trickles down to travel reporting, which if British is generally as reliably inauthentic as British weather is reliably miserable. (Why do you think have of England’s moved to Florida, and the other half to Mallorca?).
They have the right to be snobs, but do you want to make travel decisions based on that sort of attitude? A few years ago Rachel Howard, in an article about Crete, knocked the island’s “slapdash cities” and bemoaned how “driving two hours to find an empty bay felt like too much effort.”
Aww, because heaven forbid travel should involve actual effort!
Most British “travel writers” prefer to stay at a hotel or resort, in Greece or anywhere, for free and then write a glowing account of it — and I’m not saying Ms. Howard does this — which is not travel writing at all, though it is something we in the United States call payback.
Some American publications are guilty of this too, and I’ve even written for some in the past though today I keep my distance. It is the British papers, such as the Telegraph (soon to be German-owned🙄) and the (🙄) Independent and Evening Standard that are among the worst offenders. Where the publishers are too cheap to cover their writers’ expenses, so what you get is hamfisted writing and what amounts to fake travel news.
Also, there are no secret islands anywhere on the earth. In Greece, no one island is “having a moment” more than any other simply because a new resort opened and some British hack spent a couple nights there for free.
No British writer who “divides her time” between Greece or Italy and some fog-bound hellhole in Wales is an “expert” on every aspect of every Greek island. Even admittedly seasoned ones get the basics glaringly wrong: Ms. Howard, for example, once wrote that in Crete the “locals down tsikoudia, a fiery eau-de-vie-like brandy, at every opportunity.”🙄 Actually, they don’t — I know plenty of locals that might respect it, but who also don’t touch it.
Most journalists or those posing as them today are woefully undereducated. Did y’all happen to see September’s UK edition of the once-interesting, now pretty awful Conde Nast Traveler? You know, the one where Rachel Howard misidentifies the islands of Patmos and Chios as part of the Cycladic islands? — yikes.
So the next time you see a story by someone calling themselves an expert, ask yourself why they might be calling themselves that, and on what basis.
Just because their editors don’t hold them to account doesn’t mean that you can’t, and in fact, you should: the money you spend on your vacation is going to be your money, not theirs. Be smart about it, or possible be quite sorry.
Do your homework.
Avoid those self-serving British blowhards.
— Badd Bunny🐰
