This month at the RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page, Rolf interviews Peter Greenberg, author of The Complete Travel Detective Bible and travel editor for the Today Show on NBC. Here are a couple highlights from their Q&A:
“My writing career got started as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. In a campus of 33,000 students I had to try and find an identity. I was told I basically had two choices: I could try to pledge a fraternity, or I could join the student paper. So I walked down fraternity row one day, took one look at that, and ran to the student paper.”
“More and more people are embracing the important notion that travel is news, and that the audience doesn’t want me, nor do they need me, to tell them that the sun sets nicely in the Bahamas. What they want me to tell them is how — while the sun is setting nicely in the Bahamas, and the airline lost their bags and the hotel has no record of their reservation and the cab driver just took them on a 200-mile ride into town when it should have been 2 — how can I give them the information they need, and the questions to ask, and to whom, so that none of this stuff happens to them anymore.”
“We are a nation of travel addicts, and as part of that definition of addict, it also means we get abused. And we come back for more. So that’s really the nature of the beast. More people are traveling now than traveled before 9/11. So we’ve come back with a vengeance, we just want to come back with intelligence.”
“The biggest reward of doing what I do is that every once in awhile I get to share it. Travel is by my definition — and I hope by yours — an experience that is absolutely meant to be shared. And if you’re lucky enough to discover an experience and you get to share it with somebody that you care about — wow, you can’t beat that.”
Full interview available online here.
