In my routine of travel blogs and sites reading, I found out, at Tim Leffel’s site, that Budget Living magazine, targeted at backpackers and people who travel on low budgets, had closed. And its editor says this:

“The name ‘budget’ worked great with readers,” he said, “but it was a hurdle for advertisers. The name was a mixed blessing.”

That is: while the “budget” denomination is appealing to the public in general, in the same way the word “backpacker” is in our environment, advertisers finds it horrible. Thus, we have a product that may appeal to many people, but also attracts the “wrong” readers, from marketing’s point of view. Why wrong? because they’re not willing to spend a large sum of money in their travel.

Such assumption has caused that at many latin american countries, the travels section is written for five stars travellers. This happens even in newspapers, despite some of them are quite massive. The conflict is important to analyze because the issues between “the public’s interest” and the “advertisers uninterest” should be resolved. Otherwise, we’ll keep lacking good publications for the public that wants to travel without spending too much.

And there’s another issue: my perception -only, since I couldn’t prove it with numbers- i that at least here, in Argentina, the backpacker public is noticeably reluctant to support editorials initiatives regarding to cheaper ways to travel, even when these are good and not pricey. As I wrote in the entry dedicated to “extreme backpackers”, many times there’s some sort of common sense by which one “should not spend a dime at all”. So, in this extreme version of the story, the backpacker is not someone who spends little, but someone who wants to spend nothing. Of course, in the long run, such attitude holds potential dangers in relation to the local people who provide tourism services and who have to deal with people who want everything for free; and without any editorial proposals. The reason is simple: many readers don’t want to spend anything, even when the publication would help them organise the trip and save, and advertisers just don’t want to see their ads there. And that’s that. At least in this part of the world, the only travel magazines existing are aimed at middle-high class tourists. Luckily, we have the Internet, but a complement from the editorial world would be really good.