WHAT? T&L botches it again, this time with flakeyjakey coverage of Athens Riviera
Where, oh where is the pre-President Donald Trump when you need him?
LOS ANGELES — Can you just imagine what would happen if some development company headquartered in some hot shady place like Dubai tried to plop down a resort hotel facing Santa Monica Beach or (gasp!) Malibu? Sure, we got a few small oceanfront hotels, but nothing much beyond that would ever make it past the California Coastal Commission.
But when the likes of “One & Only” or Aman (owner dated Naomi Campbell, is old an chum of Putin’s, sounds like a lovely guy!) try to push their instant one-percenter luxe compounds on shores seemingly less cherished, the result is anodyne properties that add nada and benefit mostly their investors, not the locals — and you needn’t be a socialist or Bernie Sanders to make that observation.
The problem then also becomes one of lackey “journalists” who “report” on these "high-end hotel openings” without actually having paid to stay there, usually because their publishers are cheapskates. Case in point: Travel & Leisure, which was never a great publication but did have some cachet when published by American Express (incidentally, also, when I wrote for AMEX’s Departures). Now it’s owned by what was one of the companies with the dumbest names in America, Dotdash Meredith and is now “People Inc” and helmed by one of the nastiest corporate aholes you’ll ever come across, Neil Vogel. Now, this kind of serial CEO — the Howard Lutnick of ersatz quality publishing — is probably not the kind to give a lowly T&L writer the few thousand dollars it takes to actually stay at a place like One & Only Aesthesis. I know this, because I was once commissioned to do a guide for a company that eventually got to the present inappropriate name. They pay peanuts.
So for those who don’t know, the southern part of the Greek capital region thas been dubbed the “Athens Riviera.” Though it is has little in common with the French one apart from the Mediterranean Sea — warmer and more mysteriously chiseled in these parts — the stretch of coast from Glyfada up to the temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion is undergoing a transformation.
A huge urban renewal project has started at Ellinikon, home until 2001 of Athens’ international airport and for many years an operations base for the United States Air Force. Ellinikon borders Glyfada, where there was once a NATO officer’s club and where even now locals know how to find hidden coves that were it not for the distant roar of traffic could be mistaken for obscure Greek islands. The project will be years in the making, but one that has just been completed is a luxury seafront resort called One&Only Aesthesis.
It is situated on a sprawling parcel of land on a peninsula that juts into the Saronic Gulf — you can see the island of Aegina, long ago a rival to ancient Athens, across the water. The resort opened fairly recently, following a ribbon-cutting ceremony where Prime Minister Mitsotakis spoke in faultless English about benefits to the economy of bringing more high-end tourism developments into Greece, of which Aesthesis — think aesthetics, etymology aficionados — is a prime example. Whether everybody agrees about those benefits and who benefits most is another matter.
Got money? Then the thing to do here is to book one of the 95 bright and airy seaside bungalows, which channel the vibe of the 1960s when these kinds of hideaways shielded the likes of Maria Callas and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis from the paparazzi. From the terraces of many of them you can jump right into the sea — after a hot summer, still warm enough in November to do so.
But the thing is, having been given a tour of the place some time ago, we can say in complete confidence that the beaches are better at the Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel Athens — and they always were. The vibe is, too. Not that you’d know that from dipping into People Inc’s Travel + Leisure “story”, inanely titled “Age of the Aegean” (what does that even mean??) by some (ugh) British genius named Hester Underhill. No doubt Ms. Underhill’s got talent, but you wouldn’t guess it from reading her account of some of the southern Med’s poshest properties, and that could have been done better by AI.
The blame for the inaccurate or shall we say incomplete reporting should not fall to the journalist, though, but rather to the corporate apparatchiks like Mr. Vogel who are a) tightwads except when it comes to their own bloated pay and b) have been gobbling up once-iconic American media brands like radioactive turkey vultures.
The same scenario plays out again and again in the heart of the commodification machine, New York: where the New York Post has nothing at all to do with the original New York Post, ditto for the New York Sun, where Forbes today has nothing at all do with the Forbes of yore (not just saying that because I had the privilege of working at Forbes when it actually had a Fifth Avenue address, now it’s a Chinese-majority entity based somewhere in New Jersey) and no, Travel & Leisure today has nothing at all to do with the brand a certain generation of American readers once knew.
That’s all done now.
And actual trained journalists like me and a few others have to just sit there an groan while our sister-in-law’s cousin who maybe hasn’t read a book since the fourth grade emails a T&L listicle that ludicrously makes a list of the “25 best islands” and wants to know if Milos is next to Capri…
And, note to Mr. Vogel’s minions: Milos is more best-y than, uh, Corfu? Let’s be clear: Milos is lovely, as is Catalina off the coast here of Long Beach. B We understand that those were T&L reader choices — well, maybe those reader are kind of stupid. Because Catalina ain’t Oahu, and Milos is no Corfu, or Evia for that matter. Please.
Also, the misandrist thread running through the American “lifestyle” magazines needs to be called out: most of this aforementioned dross is churned out by ladies, and only rarely by gentlemen, which is interesting because men tend to be the bigger spenders in the travel space, right?
That all sounded sort of long-winded and podcast-y, did it not? God I hate podcasts. On that note, I bet Howard Stern would agree: leave today’s T&L to the recyclers. You have some cash to blow and want to know where it’s at in the Athens Riviera? Again, Four Seasons all the way. The rest is just spin.
