Ah, Those Travel-Writer Perks--Let’s Start With Paranoia and Secretiveness

See the world for free. That’s what many people think travel writing is about. Flash a business card with “travel writer” printed on it and the candy shop opens, miraculous upgrades occur, champagne appears at your door, guides show you places and things other tourists don’t get to see.

But as a matter of ethics, many magazines and newspapers, including this one, don’t allow writers to accept freebies. The company pays expenses for staff writers like me so they are beholden to no one. That makes my position enviable because I need not rely on the largess of people in the travel industry.

The “no comps, no discounts” rule has an even less understood corollary: the necessity of traveling anonymously. After all, what good does it do to reject freebies or discounts if you tell those in charge you’re writing for a newspaper or magazine?

When I’m on the road, I want to find out how the average tourist is treated and greeted at hotels, restaurants, tour desks and airline ticket counters. So I do my best to keep my name and agenda secret, which, over the years, has yielded significant discoveries, put me in touchy situations, given me reasons to laugh (mostly at myself) and made me wonder whether I’m paranoid.

I get nervous when people are too nice to me in my travels. Could they know what I’m up to? I suspected as much from the minute I arrived earlier this spring at the Lodge at Torrey Pines in La Jolla to report on the lavish new hotel. The welcoming smiles of the bellboys were too broad. The doorman told me my black convertible suited me. And when I got to my room, I discovered I had received an upgrade. Later, the owner of the lodge told me I’d been mistaken for a local mover and shaker with a name similar to mine. It was a good story, but I’m still not sure I believe it.

Going through immigration at an airport in Morocco several years ago, I dropped my passport. The woman behind me picked it up, recognized my name and started questioning me about my job as a travel writer. I cut the conversation short, however, because I didn’t want the official at the immigration desk to find out I was a travel writer. You never know when or whether it might matter.

At museums and tourist sites in foreign countries, attendants have stopped me from taking notes (and don’t even get me started on how people can be when I take pictures). After writing about my travels in China some years ago, I got a letter from a Chinese tourism official telling me the next time I visited his country, I should let him know. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it sounded more like chastisement than an invitation to tea in Beijing.

Perhaps I’m hypersensitive, but I’ve been burned. About five years ago I went to northern England’s lovely Lake District to research a story about a walking tour that offered accommodations in farmers’ barns. I will never forget that trip, the roll of the hills, the smell of heather and the incredible helpfulness of a Lake District National Park Authority staff member in the town of Keswick. He plotted my three-day walk, stowed my extra baggage behind his desk and took me for a tot of scotch at a pub.

Only later did I learn that a photographer for the newspaper that employed me at the time had gone there before me and made it clear the writer was on her way.

With far more amusement, I remember times I’ve been treated shabbily at hotels and on tours and cruises. I want to tell sour clerks and guides to get a grip because their behavior will be noted.

At a little Hudson River hotel in New York I once asked about getting a AAA discount. The clerk told me snippily that few small hotels participate in the AAA discount program. Having logged thousands of miles that year and having stayed in dozens of hotels, I had to bite my tongue to keep from putting him in his place.

On a Baltic cruise several years ago, I did everything I could to keep my identity secret, though I stood out like a water buffalo among the well-heeled couples on board. Crew members kept asking what I was doing there; I responded by making jokes and obfuscating. On the last night, I was invited to dinner with the captain and his top officers. I felt so bad about my deception that I finally just told them the truth, since I had already experienced all the ship had to offer.

I don’t mind being sneaky with people in the travel industry, but I haven’t perfectly sorted out how to deal with my fellow travelers, who often figure prominently in my stories. On an Earthwatch Institute trip to Costa Rica, yoga retreats in Montana and Utah, a small-ship cruise through Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park and a Grand Canyon Institute backpacking trip, I didn’t say I was a travel writer on assignment. But people are friendly and curious, so by the end of these trips it came out, which thrilled some but made others distinctly standoffish.

When I need more information than I’ve been able to ferret out on my own, I sometimes willingly reveal myself at the end of a stay at, say, a hotel. By that time it’s too late for the management to make me change my mind, even if I suddenly start getting turn-down service and slightly tardy welcome fruit baskets. And making it known I’m a travel writer rarely affects the way I’m treated at national parks and not-for-profit museums.

Actually, I’m utterly charmed when the people to whom I eventually reveal myself don’t care. On the Greek island of Rhodes about 10 years ago, I wanted to see rooms at a hotel where I couldn’t stay. So I told the clerk I was a travel columnist for the New York Times, which I was at the time. But he wasn’t impressed. He’d never heard of it.

To me, that’s pure entertainment, a free perk of anonymous travel writing that I never expected.