The World Tourism Organisation issued today a communicate about the european regional conference of Communication about Tourism. The debate topic was how to accomplish to get this area to stop losing tourists to asian destinations. But there was a paragraph of the communicate that grabbed my attention (I’ll cite it textually, without changing any punctuation marks):

Answering questions from delegates who argued that some, mainly western media try to impose unethical methods of promoting their destinations, Richard Baerug, marketing director of the Riga Convention Bureau said that “Companies and destinations should only deal with media that make a clear border line between advertising and journalism

I wonder: what are unethical methods? what to they pretend? that they invite them everywhere and provide them money to publish notes that in fact have only a commercial and not an informative interest? There’s a lot of that, at least in this part of the world, the south side. Anyways, I can’t disagree that it’s necessary, once and for all, to have the informative content of tourism notes clearly separated from advertisement. Otherwise, we’ll still be reading very few interesting articles and many ad-notes.