This is how Conde Nast & others missed the boat on Greece
In deference to those who read Greek Column on their mobile devices, I’m going to dispense with the charming intro and get right to the point: there is an increasing number of travel articles out there that whether because they are so abysmally written or because they are so recklessly inaccurate they ought to be deleted. But because not even Barry Diller can fight the Internet and win, that’s probably not going to happen. But need all Internet clutter be tolerated? I think not.
I do think that when it comes to special destinations like Greece, readers deserve more than tired tropes and/or glaring errors. Ok, enough philosophy: I don’t like the way Conde Nast Traveler’s Rachel Howard insults Crete in a new, half-baked piece in which she assails Crete’s “slapdash cities” and how “driving two hours to find an empty bay felt like too much effort.” Granted, the writer is trying to make a point about getting to know the island better, but from the baseline gets so much wrong, such as the ridiculous assertion that “locals down tsikoudia, a fiery eau-de-vie-like brandy, at every opportunity.” Um, no, Ms. Howard, they don’t.
Howard says her “go-to” in Chania (did we ask?) is Nikos Tsepetis of the fine Ammos hotel there, but with all due respect—I am friendly with Nikos myself and furthermore have actually been licked by his adorable Boston Terrier—a journalist shouldn’t need a go-to regardless of the destination. Just ask Mrs. Tependris. The only guarantor of authenticity in travel writing and reporting is self-sufficience: but I can tell you, it does cost more, and involves more sweat.
Also, it is a mistake to think that any place besides Italy can be defined principally by its food. I’m not particularly interested, nor should readers and planners of trips be, in what a writer puts in her or his mouth. I don’t want to read purple prose about feasting on a slow-roasted lamb—yuck (maybe some lamb out there would rather graze on a slow-roasted travel writer?) I would concur that there is fine fare to be had at Ammos, but other than that and a good spot for fish and chips Cretan-style the plain fact of life is that in Crete, the restaurants are better in Heraklion than they are in Chania. And maybe Howard likes spending time with her picnic basket in the middle of nowhere, but let no navel-gazing travel hack pull the wool over your eyes: there are plenty of stunning hotels and villas in Crete’s “honeyed west.”
In other botched-content news, there’s Euronews, which oh yes, which is another publication for which I’ve double double toiled and troubled (oh—for those of you who do most of your reading on Instagram these days, that was a reference to Billy Shakespeare) but should nevertheless be called out for publishing a distorted image of travel in Greece. As a measure of my ire, I won’t link to a dumb-ass article about “six quiet Greek islands that are COVID-free” (but here is a link to one of my stories).
Find it if you want to. What I abhor about it—beyond the general annoyance of that journalistic cop-out known as a listicle—is the implication that tourists should run to these very off-grid islands with little to no tourist infrastructure while abandoning more famous, more fun and ostensibly more non-"Covid-free" island destinations like Santorini and Mykonos. That, traveler, is a patently false narrative: first of all, no island group in Greece has been spared at least some Covid exposure, as can be verified easily enough with EODY, the Greek equivalent of the CDC and a meticulous keeper of records.
Does that mean you should cancel your trip to Mykonos? Probably not—but you might want to skip the ritual nightclubbing. Bed, bath & beyond the speciousness and cheap clickbaitiness of it, it’s inane: you cannot verify that any given place is covid-free any more than you can confirm it’s free of unfair taxation or herpes. New Zealand, etc.
Are there bigger issues? Yeah, but misinformation (Conde Nast) and disinformation (euronews) lurking under the badge of media brand build-out is still just gunk. Bunk. You, and the destination—in this example, Greece—deserve better, don’t you?