Launch: National Geographic Traveller

I picked up the launch issue of National Geographic Traveller last night from a newsstand in Charlotte Street (the one sponsored by Monocle). I've enjoyed the look, feel and content of this mag in its original US incarnation for several years so was looking forward to seeing how the UK edition would stack up, both against the original and against its main UK rivals, the divine Conde Nast Traveller and Sunday Times Travel.

The cover has the familiar National Geographic yellow frame (on all four sides - not two as shown in this image) but the mag is a large format than the US original. The UK one is 285mm x 220mm (same size as CN Traveller). Not convinced this was a good idea - sticking with the smaller format would have been an easy way to differentiate NG Traveller (surely the yellow frame guarantees newsstand visibility regardless of the size of the mag?).

The launch issue runs to 180 pages (£3.85) compared to Conde Nast's 184 pages (£3.90) and Sunday Times Travel's 164 pages (£3.70) - again, you have to ask how hard they were working here to pinch readers on launch. Surely there was room for a special price deal on issue one? That said the subs offer is spectacularly cheap - £9.60 for six issues V Conde's £24 for 12.
   You would expect photos in any National Geographic mag to be spectacular. In issue one of Traveller they come up short of that for me - 'good but not great' is where I would rate them (and a clear step down from the imagery in Sunday Times Travel), which seems odd given the organisation's long heritage and the quality of the imagery in its US mags.

The other thing you would pretty much take for granted is a team of writers who had lived and breathed their landscape before putting pen to paper. In that context, this description is just plain daft:

 'As a Londoner I saw Kent as a no-man's land of scrubby marshes dotted with pylons and sheep - somewhere that had to be got through to go on holiday via the Channel Ports.' If you think Kent is a barren wilderness, my friend, I'd suggest life as a travel writer may not be for you.

In terms of typography, CN Traveller is streets ahead of the new National Geographic mag and has the edge on ST Travel in my view. Will be interesting to see how newsstand sales go, but I can't see NG Traveller outselling either of its two main newsstand rivals on this showing.