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They would not comp status, but they would comp most of the services if they found out that the guy worked as a travel critic.

However, it would generally defeat the purpose if the critic was treated better than all the guests because then his/her experience will NOT be like any that his or her readers will have.

That's exactly the purpose. He/she goes back and raves about the place. Lots of paying customers read about it and come. Chances are most of them are satisfied, since few travel destinations are absolute disasters and the standards of most occasional travelers are not unreasonable. And if a few aren't? So what. They don't write columns anyhow.

The catch is that it's easy to get an unpaid travel writer gig with your town weekly. All airlines and major hotels know this. So, if you want more than a flower vase with a welcome note, you need better credentials.

Is anyone else bothered that a travel writer would accept a freebie such as status? (unless they'd earned it)

Call me naive, but I would bet that the NYTimes has strict rules against Joe Sharkey accepting UA 1K or AA EXP status unless he'd actually earned it.

Companies can offer all sorts of freebies to reporters, there's nothing unethical in that. The unethical act is the reporter accepting. (in my opinion...)

-BP

Exactly so. The rule of thumb for a writer ought to be: if you wouldn't want your readers to know you're doing something, don't do it.

A travel writer is more or less a journalist. He or she is supposed to be dispensing information and opinion without the influence of outsiders. IMHO a travel writer accepting comps or insider's freebies from certain travel providers is not much different from a New York Times political-campaign reporter accepting money or perks from a certain political candidate. You wouldn't take him -- or the Times -- seriously anymore. It's not ethical.

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A parallel example: Many restaurant critics go to great lengths to mask their identities/keep it a secret that they'll be in a restaurant so they don't get special treatment. If you want to take the angle of reviewing what services most travelers/customers/etc. are likely to receive, then you don't want them to know you're reviewing them because then you're experience might not be "typical."

The cruise critics in the Los Angeles Times travel section clearly state that they travel as guests of the cruiselines. I have never seen them give a ship a bad review and therefore, I feel they have little or no credibility. I find it offensive that the Times permits this.

The San Francisco Chronicle's food critic has taken a lot of heat because every chef in town knows what he looks like.

How many of you think any of the travel writers who went on the maiden voyage of the QE2 paid their way or that their papers did? I would be surprised if there were any.

Concert reviews also fall into this category. Reviewers receive first- and second-row seats. Now I've seen concerts from the first row and those concerts tend to be far more fantastic than those I've seen from a distance so great I might as well have listened from the parking lot.

Sportswriters get a heck of a lot of stuff, sometimes including travel on the team plane.

A good many newspapers - and not just the little ones - see entertainment, food and travel as just fluff anyway so don't care all that much if they take the free trips, free meals, free concert tickets.

When I was reporting and would cover events with reporters from around the nation, I was blown away by some of the stuff people at some very large papers were allowed to keep. Some of the fashion writers had their wardrobes provided gratis. My paper had a pretty strict policy against freebies, although the trips, movies, concerts, parties (Black & White Ball, etc.) were still considered OK.

Someone wrote on here recently that their paper had a policy against doing stories that could be detrimental to their advertisers. If my paper had instituted that one, it would have been time to walk and I'm pretty certain I would have had a lot of company.

Contact Elbonian Airways. I'm pretty sure they'll comp you.

I regularly commit journalism (some fellow Flyertalkers have even been quoted by me in the past) so I'd like to chime in on this topic.

The sort of "give me a freebie and I'll write more favorably about you" that seems to be the hope and plan described in the original post is considered seriously unethical in my profession. It is, in most newsrooms, a firing offense that would also render the offender essentially unemployable by other media outlets.

Access (making available to a reviewer tickets to an otherwise sold out play, reserving a seat on the campaign's charter flight) is acceptable. Trading a good writeup for access is not. Many media outlets have codes of ethics which require they pay for that access, too, whether it's the seat at the play or the seat on the charter flight.

That's not to say it's never appropriate to have the subject of a story help with travel arrangements or even pay for them. The best example I have from my own experiences would be an article I did some years ago for a beer aficionado�s magazine about the growing and harvesting of hops in the Yakima valley of Washington.

This junket (and that's what we and the PR folks who played tour guides called it) for writers and broadcasters from around the U.S. was put together by a large brewing concern that picked up my airfare and hotel expenses, arranged several tours of farms and processing facilities, made people available for interviews, and hosted a couple of evenings of media revelry.

I took the trip and wrote the story. In the second paragraph of that story, I told my readers who organized and who paid for it.

To the best of my ability that financial support didn't influence what I wrote -- how they grow and pick hops isn't really a contentious subject, anyway -- but not making it clear how a brewery's PR people made it possible to write a feature story which the magazine itself would not have spent the money to cover would have been leaving out an important part of the story.

And leaving out part of the story is bad journalism.

This article might be helpful:

http://www.writing-world.com/freelance/press.shtml

FAM rates and press junkets seem to be the norm.

Maybe I should dust off my word processor.

The reality of the matter is that a lot of papers do accept these free perks -- from simple things like movie passes all the way up to and including meals and cruises. I'm stunned the LA Times permits their travel writer to comp cruises.

Automobile section writers in newspapers are also some of the most notorious for cozying up to local dealers and writing favorable reviews. I knew a guy when I worked at a newspaper once who always, always raved about whatever new car Cadillac came out with. Funny how he always drove a new one every yeat, too.

I agree with what others have said -- this kind of conflict of interest is unethical and undermines the credibility of the writers and their publications.

Travel journalists and freelancers, especially at the local paper level, are usually paid very little or not at all. Cut off the deals and you shut down the writing.

Even for large circulation papers, much of the travel writing is freelance and what the authors are paid in total wouldn't cover much of a trip.

On balance, I guess I'm for merely disclosure of any potential conflicts of interest.

I have 36 years experience as a writer and journalist. When I began, I took advantage of every freebie given to me (it was the norm in the profession in those days) but soon learned that even if nobody told me what I had to write, I felt I owed the freebie-givers something.

I soon learned to pass up getting "something for nothing" because it doesn't exist -- at least not for a reporter with any self-respect.