Why would anyone buy a travel magazine?” said the representative of WHSmith, then by far the biggest retailer of magazines in the UK. “They can get a free brochure from a holiday company.”
It was 1993, and my partner, Paul Morrison, and I had decided to launch a travel magazine, having had the idea on a flight to Ecuador. We knew there must be other people like us who wanted to explore the world and whose idea of travel went far beyond lying by a hotel swimming pool. There had been other travel magazines launched but none had lasted, and many ‘experts’ predicted we would fail too.
Indeed, a few months after we brought out our first issue, put together in our spare room, I was in the audience of a travel-writing talk at the Royal Geographical Society when a speaker mentioned there was a new travel magazine but that it “wouldn’t
