This magazine started as an argument. One of us had been sent to a famous coastal town in August, filed the expected piece, and then went back alone in the second week of November to see what was there. The second visit was better in every way that mattered and impossible to sell to any editor at the time.
Seventeen years later that is still the whole idea. We report from the weeks that get left out: after the shutters come down, before the lifts turn, during the fortnight the desert has weather. Half the restaurants are shut. The light is short. The rate is a third of what it was.
What you get back is a place that is not performing for anybody, and the specific pleasure of standing in it without a queue behind you. We think that is the better holiday. We have never been able to persuade anybody of it in the abstract, which is why we keep publishing the evidence.
Rooms are booked at the published rate under an ordinary name, and the property is not told we are coming. No free stays, no press trips, no affiliate links, no sponsored pieces. If that ever changes it will be at the top of the article, not in the footer.
Every place has one. A review that does not tell you what is wrong with a hotel, or what a destination loses in the month we are recommending, is advertising with better typography.
Not the shoulder — the stretch after it, when the visitor economy stops and the place goes back to running itself. Worse weather, fewer options, half the price, and the thing itself rather than the performance of it.
Four or five pieces a month, all reported first-hand. It is a poor way to build traffic and the only way we are interested in working.