Interview With Paige McClanahan: New York Times Journalist and host of The Better Travel Podcast

The Travel Coach Network podcast is your weekly dose of travel coach info, inspo and news from around the globe. Tune in to each episode to hear inspiring stories of successful travel coaches who are building their lives and business around travel, all while exploring the world. You'll also learn all about travel coaching, setting intentions for your trip, adding meaning to travel, and how you can grow your own travel coaching business. Because remember, there is more to a travel career than just blogging and booking. Now join us as we reshape how and why people travel. 

Sahara Rose: Welcome back to the Travel Coach Network podcast. It is I, Sahara Rose De Vore, the founder of the Travel Coach Network and the creator and instructor of the Travel Coach Certification Program. Today I have a very lovely guest, I have Paige McClanahan. She is an American travel journalist based in the French Alps. Born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Paige has lived in five countries since she left the U.S. in 2008. A regular contributor to the New York Times, she is also the creator and host of The Better Travel Podcast, a show that celebrates and promotes travel that has a positive impact on the world. Her book about the tourism industry will be published by Scribner and Simon & Schuster in 2024. Paige, thank you so much for joining us today. I am so excited to jump into all of that. How are you doing? And welcome!

Paige: Thank you so much. I'm doing very well and thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm excited to speak to you. 

Sahara Rose: Absolutely. I'm excited to chat with you too. You are a very interesting person to have on our podcast. I would like to start with where did your love and passion for travel stem from? 

Paige: Well, I did do some travel with my family as a kid. I mean, not a ton of travel. We traveled around the United States a little bit, mainly to see family and to go to the beach and stuff. But when I was 16 and when I was 17, I had two trips that really kind of opened my mind to the possibilities of immersive travel. 

So the summer when I was 16, I did a homestay in France, which is the country that I ended up calling home now. I stayed with the family and I was in France for six weeks and the family spoke no English, so my French really got a workout. 

Then the following summer, when I was 17, I spent a month in Ghana and lived with a family there and was doing some volunteer work with some other American high school students during the day but the most transformative part of that whole experience was staying with the family and same in France. 

I think those experiences, I mean, I certainly remember feeling homesick and feeling really out of my depth at other times, or really uncomfortable at times, but I think they opened my eyes to just how transformative a slightly challenging travel experience can be. I grew so much as an individual, I learned so much about myself, and I learned so much about the culture and the society in which I had grown up by leaving it and having these experiences. So, yeah, I would say those two experiences, both of them really sparked the passion that has continued ever since. 

Sahara Rose: I love that, and what then inspired you to become a travel writer and to write about travel? As we mentioned in the intro you often write for the New York Times, and I've seen some of your pieces in AFAR and other travel-related publications and not even just travel related. But where does that love of writing come from? 

Paige: That’s a good question! I'm not sure myself, but all I know is that it has always been there. Like, words have always been what I've been drawn to. From my earliest memories, I've always been drawn to words. 

Even as I was getting older and as I was first entering this sort of working world in my early twenties, I kind of learned or sort of saw that this is what I could contribute, that people valued. I was trying a lot of different jobs or a lot of different activities and I just kept coming back to writing. This was what I could do fairly well, certainly not perfectly, but this is what people were asking me to do and the work that I was searching out, so I always knew that my work was going to revolve around words, really. 

I was working as an editor and I started working as a journalist, but I've written about all sorts of things. I actually started off as sort of an economics journalist and the world of travel emerged from, you know, my life essentially. As I was traveling the world, I started writing about my travels and then four and a half, almost five years ago, my family and I moved to the little village here in the French Alps that we call home and in our village, tourism is really the lifeblood of the economy and so I started to look at travel and tourism in a very different way as a resident of a tourist destination. Of course, I had always loved to travel and then becoming a resident of a place just gave it this whole new level of depth and meaning that I was really interested in exploring in my writing. So essentially, since we've moved here, that has really become the focus of all of my writings. 

Sahara Rose: I love that and I'm sure there's so much for you to write about the French Alps, they're so beautiful. As you were talking, I hear words like “transformative travel” and “immersive travel”. From a writer's standpoint, what do these words mean? Especially when they’re used in the media because we know that we hear these words quite often, “meaningful travel”, “mindful travel”, “transformative travel”, and even “wellness travel” sometimes, too. These words have become very popular among travel and tourism hospitality companies to use in their marketing. People talk about it, but when words get used so often, they tend to lose their meaning. To you and to you as a writer, what do those mean? 

Paige: That's an excellent question. Thank you so much for asking that question, first of all, because I think you are doing the right thing, like unpacking when we come across a term like that, whether it's in marketing materials or in an interview or in sort of an article we're reading taking the time to ask that question of ourselves and of the material that we're reading, I think is absolutely the first step. 

One of the words that we come across so often now is “sustainable travel”, which I think is a really interesting and complicated concept because the whole concept of sustainability is that we're doing things in a way that we're not sacrificing the future, whether environmentally or socially or economically, whatever, for the sake of the present, right? So I think that's one way to think about sustainability in travel. 

There's also a term called “responsible travel”, which I really like, actually and responsible travel is really about asking travelers to take responsibility for themselves when they're visiting a place. I kind of like that because it encourages self-reflection and encourages some kind of questioning of our own assumptions and our own behavior when we're traveling. But ultimately I think when we think about sustainable travel or responsible travel we’re thinking about travel that benefits the residents of the place that we're visiting and that benefits the travelers ourselves.

In terms of immersive travel or meaningful travel, I think that really has to do with the emotional kind of openness that we show when we're traveling and I think in order to have immersive travel or meaningful travel we really need to open ourselves up which means maybe asking ourselves some uncomfortable questions or putting ourselves into challenging situations sometimes. In doing so, you open up the possibility of having a really rich experience, I think of my time in Ghana or my time in France when I was a teenager, a really rich experience that can change the way you see the world. 

Sahara Rose: Yeah, absolutely. As The Travel Coach Network continues to grow and there are so many different types of travel professionals that come into it, I hear often talking about them gravitating towards transformative travel or meaningful travel. But what I like to do, especially here on the podcast, is give them actual ideas of what does that look like for your business? Just because we hear words doesn't mean that we have to use them in our business, in our copy, in our marketing and on our websites. I always tell my members of my TCN to define what things mean for themselves. There are so many different definitions out there. Like, you were talking about sustainability, responsible tourism, mindful travel, and transformative travel. Those words mean something different to everyone so from a business standpoint, just define them based on what you're passionate about, because travel is such a powerful tool, we all know that, and it can impact us and our planet in so many different ways, so really taking it from the standpoint of an individual and identifying what does that look like for you and those that you help within your business? 

When it comes to your travel writing, I'm sure that you do a lot of research and you really put yourself out there, whether it's at events or any way that you can just absorb what's going on in the travel industry. As we know as we continue to come out of this pandemic here, a lot has changed within the tourism and hospitality industries, but in my belief, a lot for the better as well. It's gotten us to think about a lot of really important topics that would have taken a lot longer had the pandemic not happened. What are some trends? What are some things you're hearing or seeing when it comes to the tourism industry? 

Paige: I agree with you that this is such a fascinating moment in the travel world, and it's one reason why I'm so excited to be writing a book about the tourism industry right now because it's just such a rich time of change. 

I'm seeing a few different trends. Number one, this trend really cuts across countries, it cuts across destinations. I've seen this cropping up in lots of different places, is that destinations are really kind of taking the reins back in terms of how they manage tourist flows and tourist activity in their communities. 

You know, we're seeing this in places like Venice and Amsterdam and Barcelona, some of these kinds of classic, quote-unquote, overtouristed destinations in Europe where local leaders are really listening to their residents and putting in place rules or regulations or, in some cases, new laws that are shifting the way that tourists interact with that city, whether in terms of where they go or how much they have to pay to go somewhere or where they might stay, that kind of thing. 

I'm also seeing this trend in Hawaii and in Key West, Florida, where residents recently voted to limit traffic. So I think this is a really positive development, obviously for the residents of these places but I also think it's a really positive development for us, for travelers, for visitors to these places because I think of the phrase “good fences make good neighbors”, right? Like we all need some structure, some thoughtful structure around how we experience places. And that means that when we have that in place, we as travelers can visit a place safe in the assumption that we're not infringing on someone's quality of life by going there and we'll be more eagerly welcomed by the residents if they're happier with how tourism is operating in their home communities. So that's one big trend. 

The other trend just briefly is that I really see travelers looking for more sustainable and more meaningful experiences and experiences that have a positive impact on the destinations they're visiting and this is really backed up by surveys. I think Booking.com does a big global survey and the Vacationer and Kind Traveler. There are a bunch of surveys that have shown this shift in people. I think we're not taking travel for granted as much as we did before the pandemic and people are being more thoughtful, they are looking to be more conscientious and making their travel decisions in the future which again, I think is a fantastic development. So I'm like you, I'm an optimist. I think that the industry is really coming out of this very difficult time moving maybe slowly but definitely moving in the right direction in a lot of ways. 

Sahara Rose: Yeah, I think it's a time that many companies, tourism hospitality companies or big travel management companies or just companies with business travelers, I'm very immersed in the business travel industry, it's a time that woke a lot of them up to start at least talking about better travel and really shifting the narrative on why people travel and the value that it has in particular for the business travel industry. 

I was reading a document that came out yesterday by someone named Eric Bailey who is a Global Travel Manager and runs a big program at Microsoft. He and I both spoke at ProcureCon last year. This document stemmed from back in June, I believe. There was what they called The Purposeful Travel Summit and it was a lot of these people from the business travel industry got together to just brainstorm how do you really change the look of business travel? And obviously, I come from a standpoint of I focus on the well-being of travelers and really changing how travel is viewed as a tool to help us improve, whether it's our well-being, our emotional well-being, our physical well-being, mental well-being, or also our work performance because there's a lot of research out there that talks about how travel can really benefit all these areas when done intentionally. The whole document, it was a 15-page document but at least it talks about all of these people from all of these different companies, different positions, and different roles coming together and talking about things like cultural experiences, personal growth and personal fulfillment when traveling and in the business travel industry, that's a big deal. So I thought that was really interesting and like you said, this is a time that it's very interesting, but I feel like a lot of good is going to be coming out of the tourism hospitality industry as we move forward here. 

When it comes to your book, though, I want to hear more about why you're writing a book on tourism and what exactly are you writing about? 

Paige: That's an excellent question and one that I was asking myself this morning, actually, as I was typing away. Joking aside here, the book really emerged from our moving to this village in the French Alps where we live and where tourism is so important economically and for the sort of social and cultural life of the village. 

It's really fascinating, and I've been a traveler my whole life, but I never really questioned the industry as much as I have now, as much as I've been doing now, living in this place and I see travel as such an important force for good in the world, such a potentially important force for good in the world, and a force that has so many potential downsides as well, whether we're talking economically or socially or environmentally. 

So living here and experiencing tourism on the receiving end, I guess, just made me really want to understand the nuances of this industry. In the book, I'm trying to give people a framework for understanding how we can do tourism in a way that maximizes the positive impacts of travel and tourism and minimizes the negative impacts. I think the first step in doing that is just understanding it. 

A lot of books have been written about sustainable travel, like, how do you do sustainable travel, which I think are great and useful and interesting but I'm trying to go kind of a step further by really giving people the tools that they need, the understanding that they need to be able to ask and answer their own questions themselves by kind of unpacking the industry, showing how it works, showing the dynamics that are at play in a bunch of different destinations around the world. So the book is a combination of dispatches from different places I visited. I was in Hawaii for about a month over the summer. I was in Cambodia last month. I was in India in September. I'm writing about the French Alps here. Actually, I'm writing about Barcelona, lots of different places. I'll be going to Kenya in the spring. So I’m trying to bring in sort of case studies, stories, and reporting from around the world and weaving that together with some academic analysis and my own analysis of how this industry works and how people can understand it in a way that will help them hopefully navigate it themselves because I think we kind of have to get beyond the lists of do's and don'ts. Like, this industry is just way too complicated for a list of do's and don'ts. We need to understand it in a more nuanced, deeper way. That's the aim of the book. But I'm still writing it, so we'll see where it goes. 

Sahara Rose: I love that. Is this going to be your first book?

Paige: It is, actually, yes. Very first book. I was excited to land a deal with my publisher earlier this year, and so now I'm working toward my deadline of September 2023, which is when my first full draft is due to my editor in New York and then, yeah, we'll see how many big notes he gives me on the draft. But it's been a really fascinating and wonderful reason to ask important questions and to meet fascinating people who are managing tourism and people who are working in the tourism industry. 

Frankly, to be honest, like in Hawaii, I met with some people who are, frankly, very opposed to tourism in their communities, like, outright opposed to tourism and I'm trying to take in all these views because they all exist. They all exist in this world of travel and tourism. I think it's important for people to be able to understand this so they can navigate this world on their own, so that’s my goal. 

Sahara Rose: I love that. What is the process of landing a book deal with a publisher? I have a book, but it's on Amazon, and I self-published it, so that sounds like a lot easier route. 

Paige: Yeah, so my first step was to basically write a book proposal, or what I thought was a book proposal, it was kind of a baby book proposal in retrospect. I literally Googled, like, “how to write a book proposal”, and you can find formats online. 

Then I worked with my agent, a lovely woman, who's incredibly kind and wise and a lovely guide for me. She helped me get the proposal to a point where she and I were both happy with it, and then she pitched it to publishers. That was kind of earlier this year, she pitched around to I don't know how many? Like a couple of dozen, probably, publishing houses. We got a few offers and decided which one we wanted to go with. So she's kind of my business partner in this, but yeah, absolutely would have been impossible without her. She's been a fantastic partner in this, so all credit goes to my agent really.

Sahara Rose: That's exciting. Is there a time when you're supposed to be finished with that? 

Paige: Yeah, we're aiming to publish in May or June, probably early June 2024. Just a year and a half from now, but hopefully, like, late spring, early summer 2024. 

Sahara Rose: I hope you enjoy the whole process of it because that's a very exciting thing to be doing and working on. I hope that you're proud of yourself because not many people can land a publishing deal for a book so that's wonderful. I look forward to reading it and sharing it with The Travel Coach Network once it's ready. 

Paige: You're very kind to say that. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It's good to hear that because as with any sort of big long-term projects, there are some kind of hair-pulling out moments and moments of doubt. 

But I am enjoying the process of reporting and writing and thinking about these issues so much. I really hope that my passion for this subject comes through in the writing, because I don't want to write a book that's kind of a big downer, because travel deserves better than that. Travel is important. Travel is such an important means of communication and promoting human understanding, and I think it's so important. So I want to write a book that celebrates that while also being honest about the downsides that we all need to navigate. 

Sahara Rose: Yeah, absolutely. I know you're going to do a wonderful job. You're a beautiful writer. So as we wrap it up here, I always like to ask my guests, is there a fun fact about yourself that you’d like to share with the audience? It doesn't have to be business or travel related. 

Paige: Sure! This is one of those fun in retrospect facts but I have had intimate experience of healthcare systems in many different countries, both because of illness and because I've given birth in two different countries. 

So I had malaria when we lived in Sierra Leone. I had typhoid fever when I was in Peru when I was 22. I had dysentery on a trip to Tajikistan in 2010. I gave birth to one child in England in 2013, and I gave birth to another child in Kenya in 2016. 

So I've had a little tour of the world's hospitals and medical clinics. I mean, obviously, the giving birth experiences were joyful, although, of course, challenging in their own ways but even the kind of slightly less pleasant experiences of falling ill with malaria and typhoid and dysentery didn't put me off traveling, I have to say. I mean, my travel bug is like, incurable at this point. But yeah, I still have not had dengue fever, and I really hope to avoid that one. 

Sahara Rose: Knock on wood! Well, sounds like you can beat anything that you come down with. You should write about medical tourism next time!

Paige: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, they've all been like, apart from the childbearing all, it's been sort of involuntary trips to medical establishments. [laughs]

Sahara Rose: [laughs] Well, wonderful, Paige. Is there anything else that you want to tell our audience about? And if not, just let us know where we can follow and learn more about you and follow your journey. 

Paige: Well, I would encourage anybody who's interested in following my travels and my work to visit my website, paigemcclanahan.com, and to sign up for my newsletter there. I send a newsletter issue out once a month, and I offer a bunch of links to fun and interesting things like news articles and podcasts and TV shows all around this theme of travel. 

I also give a little update on my own travels and reporting and have some other little fun links in there too. So sign up for that or subscribe to my podcast, The Better Travel Podcast, or just follow me on Instagram. I'm @paigemcclanahan on Instagram. And yeah, say hello. I always love to hear from people who are either podcast listeners or who have come across my writing. It's always great to speak to people who are in this world and who love travel because I think we're a lot of like-minded souls out there. 

Sahara Rose: Wonderful. Well, thank you, Paige, and thank you so much for joining us today for this wonderful conversation. 

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