- Rip up your travel bucket list.
- That’s the advice of Melinda Stevens, the editor of Condé Nast Traveler who says: “I hate the idea of going to a place, taking the picture, ticking the box, and moving on.”
- Stevens told Insider how she – and the magazine – are trying to champion local, family-run, and less trendy places because she’s “haunted by overtourism.”
- She added that she thinks we all have a part to play in the overcrowding of cities like Venice.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
If you think of travel destinations as places to check off a bucket list, you’re doing it all wrong.
In fact, you might as well rip that list up.
That’s according to Melinda Stevens, the editor of Condé Nast Traveler who has been at the helm of the magazine for seven years.
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Speaking to Insider ahead of the launch of the magazine's September/October issue, "The New Nomad," which explores what it means to be a traveler today, Stevens explained the meaning behind some of the colorful post-it notes scattered on the walls of her eclectic office in London's Vogue House.
Of the one that read "alternative bucket lists," she said:
"Everyone's talking about their bucket list - tick, tick, tick.
"I said, 'If anyone mentions bucket list in this office I'm going to kill them, because I hate the idea of going to a place, taking the picture, ticking the box, and moving on.
"People need to go to places and then just settle and explore and get rooted and start talking to the guy in the cafe and meeting his family."
Stop making a plan and just get lost
Foto: Melinda Stevens.sourceInstagram @melindalp
As someone who is regularly on the go for work, Stevens often finds herself traveling between London and New York as well as the likes of Miami, Charleston, Paris, and Milan. She told Insider: "By the time I want to go on holiday, I want it to be low key.
"I'm a big proponent of going to cities and getting lost and not necessarily having an agenda and having everything mapped out, because part of the deliciousness of travel is the spontaneity," she said. "And part of it is when things go wrong.
"Often enough, and I'm not talking about in extreme ways, but when you lose your way that's when you bump into the lovely local family who invite you in and that's when you form meaningful connections.
"I think sometimes when things are oversubscribed, your adherence, your loyalty is to the agenda rather than having your eyes open and your ears open and your heart open to meeting different types of people."
'We must be careful of not suffocating the thing that we love'
Foto: Melinda Stevens in India.sourceMelinda Stevens
Because of this, Stevens is always hesitant to offer suggestions of "under-the-radar" places she thinks people should travel.
"I'm so haunted now by overtourism," she said. "I'm conflicted about imparting these 'secret places.' That happened recently with a story and it was very interesting to see how far it went, and then how it came back and bit me in the ass."
Despite being a fan of the wilderness and going "somewhere quiet to recharge," she loves India, which she calls "sensationally charming and grandiose and then other times kind of backbreaking and eye-watering.
"It feels like to me India can take us, it can take the tourists because it's just got such backbone."
Trips she hopes to take include Namibia, "because I can't picture a single other person there right now," and Japan. "Of course it's absolutely full of people, but I'm also drawn to places where the culture is so intrinsically itself and different from us."
However, Stevens often tries to champion what's local, family-run, and far less trendy.
"We must be careful of not suffocating the thing that we love," she said.
"Sometimes we'll report on some great new swanky opening in Madagascar ... but I take huge pleasure in rooting out the tiny little gorgeous A-frame huts on the beach, where there's just sand underfoot and a crab taco around the corner, you know, with barely a fan in sight, but just is on the beach. You wake up with a fuzzy dawn and it's bliss."
She added: "A lot of the time I just like being on a beach and not wearing any shoes.
"A lot of what people are looking for now is really a question of taking off your shoes, feeling the earth beneath your feet, looking up, seeing the Milky Way ... like basic shit. But it turns out a lot of us are very separate from that."
There's so much to see just around the corner
Another thing Stevens is championing, both in the US and in the UK, is the idea of the staycation (and train instead of plane travel) - there's even a monthly "Staycation" column in the magazine.
"It used to be in Traveler that we would never write about the UK. Someone said to me at the beginning, seven years ago, 'if you write about the UK then that's not travel.'"
This is something she's actively trying to change.
"There are so many amazing young kids opening little tiny hotels and employing local. There's an antique shop that opens down the roads and then a coffee shop and suddenly you're talking about a bustling community again. And it's all literally around the corner from us."
'It's not an overtourism situation, it's an overpopulation issue'
Instagram, obviously, has played a role in making some places more popular with tourists than others.
"Instagram's primary pleasure in the first place was its visual relishing of the world's delights, and I mean that from its breakfasts to the seasons to babies to the Amalfi Coast," she said.
However, Stevens believes we all have a part to play in the overtourism problem that's impacting cities like Venice.
Companies like Airbnb, which have made it easier and cheaper to travel, have also had a role, she says, despite being a big fan of the brand.
Read more: The 19 most visited cities around the world in 2019
"We're all responsible to a certain degree. We all play a part.
"The macro issue is just the amount of people on this planet. How do we respect the planet that we're on?
She went on: "It's not an overtourism situation, it's an overpopulation issue. I think that I have to be mindful for the responsibility that I share in it, I need to make sure that we're not always championing, the new, we're not always championing the pop-up coffee shop.
"I don't want people to travel the world and expect to find the same pack-made ideas in every place. We don't all want to see Shoreditch in Cape Town and Williamsburg in Berlin - the point of the world is that it needs to be absolutely itself.
"I want people to see the world in a way that they just didn't know that was out there."
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