Tiscali Community Who cares

I am an international travel writer, and the guidebooks to which I contribute will henceforth carry a corporate health warning. Readers of the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet books will be advised to think before they fly because the impact of flying on global warming should, well, give them pause for thought. Both publishers have pledged money to Climate Care, a limited company, for projects designed to offset the greenhouse gas emissions caused by their globetrotting researchers.

Travellers will be urged to consider slower, more environmentally friendly ways of reaching their destination. This effectively restricts residents of Australia (where Lonely Planet is based) to cruise ships, which might spend 55 days crossing the ocean from Fremantle to Liverpool. A fortnight's holiday in, say, Paris, would take almost four months.

It would be a leisurely, rewarding journey, if you had the time and the money to make it. If, for instance, you were a guidebook publisher who, having seen the world on the cheap, had suddenly decided other people should not do the same. By 'other people', I mean, of course, Other People: men and women with real jobs and rent to pay, who can't afford a gap year or an overland odyssey. And you know what? They're no great loss. It's not as if they go to the art galleries anyway. A holiday for them is a stag party in Tallinn, with 70p pints and £10 prostitutes. It is these frivolous, short-term stays, made possible by cheap flights on no-frills airlines, that the guidebook publishers are most concerned about.

'I'm certainly cutting down on casual travel,'Rough Guides' founder Mark Ellingham told the Guardian. 'If someone invited me to a stag party in Prague, I wouldn't go 'what's wrong with Bournemouth?' Well, the Rough Guides website entry for Prague says, 'Few other cities, anywhere in Europe, look as good...[Prague is] very beautiful...smothered in a rich mantle of Baroque, Rococo and Art Nouveau'. The (rather shorter) section on Bournemouth calls it a 'blandly modern town'. Exploring the public gardens, however, 'can easily fill a day'. But who cares? Because it's just a stag party, right? It's hardly a Grand Tour. If you live north of Oxford (God forbid!), it's cheaper and quicker to fly to Prague than to catch a train to Bournemouth, but you've got all the time in the world, right?

Alastair Sawday, a member of the Soil Association and the publisher of the Special Places to Stay guidebooks, told The Bristol Magazine, 'we don't encourage long-haul journeys', but he publishes a guide to India from his carbon neutral offices in Long Ashton. How does he expect people to get to Mumbai? The overland route through Afghanistan? 'People travelled long before cars and aeroplanes came along,' says Sawday. That's true, but working class people didn't.

There are two not always distinct fears about cheap air travel. The first is the environmentalist contention that the expected 300 per cent increase in flights over the next 20 years will ruin the planet. The second is the worry that hoards of chavs in football shirts will ruin the planet, pissing in Latvian fountains, drunkenly trampling a rich cultural heritage which hardly anybody knew about until 15 years ago. Cheap flights spread hooliganism, destroy the environment and erode traditional ways of life.
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