I’ve flown with SkyEurope Airlines on three travel assignments: first down to Dubrovnik in 2006, then back again to Dubrovnik for another story in 2007, then over to Brussels in 2008. Of all the airlines flying out of Prague, I chose SkyEurope primarily because they were traveling to my destinations at times that were convenient. Second, I appreciated the prices: the first time my wife and I went to Dubrovnik, we paid the equivalent of $95 for each round-trip ticket. And third, I liked the Boeing 737s, which I prefer to Airbus A320s for no reason I can state here.
Although I enjoyed those flights, I’m not sure if I’ll be booking any new tickets with SkyEurope, as the grapevine is rife with stories about canceled flights and canceled routes. Petr Bokůvka reports that the airline is now down to its last four aircraft. Some of the shiny 737s have been replaced with older, loaner MD-83s.
Even more ominous, at least from a travel writer’s point of view: SkyEurope’s in-flight magazine just included an outdated travel feature that sent travelers to a bar that had closed some 18 months earlier.
That’s not a good sign. But perhaps it’s not terribly surprising. I was once asked to contribute to SkyEurope’s in-flight magazine by the Slovak production company that was then putting it together (like many in-flights, the magazine is produced ex-house; it now appears to come from Ink Publishing). For a travel feature of 1,200 words, the magazine offered to pay €150, or just 12.5 cents per word: roughly half of what could be called a not-great rate per word, one-quarter of a decent rate per word, and about one-eighth of the normal per-word rate paid by most in-flight magazines I’ve worked with. (NB: this is what they wanted to pay for a full-length feature with a very short deadline of just a few days, a situation which would normally call for the fee to be increased substantially.)
Naturally, I told them it was too little for what they wanted and refused the assignment. Now, a year or so later, it seems that they managed to get some words from me into their pages anyway.
Here’s a sentence from my article on Prague dining which ran in the New York Times of September 16, 2007:
“Czech cooking, however, has long been viewed as the lone downside, as if Prague’s delicious buffet of castles, concerts and cobblestones simply had to have a counterbalance.”
Here’s how that outdated article from travel writer Sarah Woods put it in December of 2008:
“For it wasn’t that long ago, that Prague epitomised the bad old days of Czech dining, which has been viewed as the nation’s lone downside – a counterbalance to all the castle towers and medieval cobblestone streets.”
Here’s a comment from August 25, 2008, on ivebeenthere.co.uk (which also sounds like my work):
“Nestled in a faded 18th century Baroque building below Prague Castle, the restaurant serves excellent modern European food.”
Here’s how that December 2008 article put it:
“…located in a faded 18th-Century Baroque building below Prague Castle,” Pálffy Palác serves “a menu of excellent modern European food.”
There are other similarities as well (the article’s description of la Degustation also seems to be a simple reworking from my story), but I don’t have enough interest to copy every standout turn of phrase and paste it into Google — a procedure, you’d have to imagine, that must be very similar to how this article was created.
It looks like two cases of getting what you pay for. Pay a low price for your tickets? There’s a good chance your flight will be canceled. Offer little more than unsalted peanuts for travel features? The articles in your magazine just might be cut-and-paste, cribbed-up hack jobs where some of the recommended spots closed down many months ago.
As always, buyer beware.
