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IT—Inside Traveler
By Jessie Johnston and Emily King

November 28, 2006:

Rooms with a Muse: Traveler Inspires a Hotel

IT was intrigued to read a recent Advertising Age article (thanks to a tip from Gawker) about a California hotelier who bases the concepts for his boutique properties on magazines. We moved from intrigue to infatuation when we learned that Joie de Vivre Hospitality's holdings include a hotel inspired by National Geographic Traveler. San Francisco's Hotel Carlton was designed to exhibit five qualities CEO Chip Conley and his staff attribute to our publication: "enchanting, international, cheerful, bohemian, eclectic." (We are, aren't we?)

We bloggers think they did a pretty good job, and wonder whether Conley might be willing to send his designers over to make Jessie's office look a little more like this, or maybe upgrade our conference room. Other JDV properties include the Rolling Stone-styled Phoenix Hotel, the Wired-themed Hotel Avante and the Dwell/Real Simple love child Hotel Vitale.

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Frightening Facts

It takes a certain kind of über-nerd to be a researcher at National Geographic Traveler—one who takes disproportionate pleasure in determining which of the world's volcanoes are currently the most active, figuring out the Assamese name for the elephant-apple tree, and speaking in stilted Spanish with Andalusian monks. As we've already shared with you, Marilyn Terrell is one such person. Jessie Johnston is another.

In addition to her blogging duties, Jessie is responsible for fact-checking articles that get published in Traveler magazine. In the current issue, she had the daunting task of checking the World Heritage Destination Scorecard, which included not-always-favorable descriptions of 94 separate destinations. In the process of tracking down some of the more cantankerous facts, she had some geeked-out fun. (Be sure to click the hyperlinks to see what she's talking about):

"As a general rule, checking negative descriptions is harder than positive ones. While I always keep a grain of salt on hand when asking a hotel if their rooms are in fact tastefully decorated, I at least feel confident that I'll get a response. It's a little harder to check something like whether Angkor really does have a 'potentially catastrophic' lack of sewage treatment. The likelihood that someone over there will provide me with accurate negative information is pretty slim. So, I have to resort to other means. With this article, I was so struck by some of the online images I used for my research that I wanted to share them with readers.

"I came across the first while checking our description of Krakow's historic center: '…billboards on the main square. Horrid!' I couldn't very well call up the Krakow tourism office, ask 'do you have horrid billboards in your main square?', and expect an honest answer. Luckily, I didn't have to. The city graciously provided me with an answer, thanks to the panoramic photo of the square on its site. No sooner had I scrolled a half-inch to the left, but I saw just such a billboard, and a couple more inches of scrolling revealed one even more horrid. My work there was done.

"The most shocking discovery I made, though, was thanks to my good friend Google Earth. In the article, the Egyptian Pyramids at Giza were described as threatened by urban sprawl. Used to seeing the pyramids depicted as floating in a vast sea of desert, I wasn't quite sure where the sprawl would be coming from, but I needed to confirm its existence. I opened Google Earth, and quickly found Giza thanks to the stack of yellow rectangles depicting National Geographic featured content. I was so stunned by how close Cairo's suburbs are to these wonders of the world that I immediately called my colleagues in to see. First, I'd zoom in close on the pyramids, showing them as we typically imagine them. Next, I'd zoom out, inevitably provoking gasps, or at least exclamations. Not even Jonathan Tourtellot, our sustainability maven and the article's author, knew just how bad the situation was. I was glad to be checking this article in the age of the Internet, though hardly glad at what it was allowing me to confirm."

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Emily King, Traveler's assistant to the editor, wants to visit the Pyramids of Giza before they're just a suburb of Cairo. Researcher Jessie Johnston hopes to see Machu Picchu before it becomes an Angkor-style jungle gym.

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