On a cliché level, it’s not the most obnoxious one out there, but it’s a shoddy simile. How can you compare a place to an action that nobody in human history has actually performed*?

*Unless I got the wrong end of the stick, and Back To The Future was a documentary.

This cliché, to be fair, is more of an editor-driven crime. Many a writer has turned in a perfectly good, cliché gun-free piece on, say, Vilnius, to find a headline daubing it as ‘The New Prague’.

It’s one of those things that quickly conveys that somewhere is supposedly cool, irrespective of the vast differences between the two destinations being compared.

But mostly, it’s just utter balls. Someone (usually the Lonely Planet at the start of each year) arbitrarily declares 10 to 12 places to be new, cool destinations in order to get cheap publicity. Everyone copies this, irrespective of whether more visitors are going to said places or not. And because no-one knows anything about the destination they’re hyping, they just say it’s the new *insert destination they hyped in exactly the same way last year*. Simple, huh?

Postscript: @Lewisshields pointed me in the direction of this little doozy from earlier this year. Ladies and gentlemen – Portsmouth is the new Malta!

And, yes, I have to confess to using this one more than a few times.

When we get assistance from PR companies and tourist boards, it’s only polite to keep those PR chaps and chapesses informed when an article comes out.

Personally, I send an e-mail with the weblink to the article when it comes out. And the response?

“That’s great. Thanks!” Every. Single. Time.

Is there some kind of secret PR conspiracy that we’re not being let in on?

Far better to just skip it altogether, and just say the place has “a rich cultural heritage”. It’s OK – the reader will know exactly what you mean, and you can go back to padding out 1,000 words with florid descriptions of how excellent the cocktails were and how you and your delightful children had such a lovely time.

Thus “verdant” comes in; a word that is never used in real life.

The same theory applies to “azure” – inevitably used for a blue sea (or, even better, a crystal clear one – neatly forgetting to explain how water can be both crystal clear and deep blue at the same time).

And, of course, there’s “golden”. Why? Because yellow doesn’t sound all that sexy when you’re describing sand. Travel writer law also dictates that “golden” is used as a default to describe all sandy beaches, even the white ones.

With thanks to Mark Hodson of 101holidays.co.uk for the suggestion.

Do you have any favourite travel writer clichés? Why not suggest a few by leaving a comment below?

I could have kept going for hours and hours and hours…

In any reasonable terms, an icon is something that can be used as a symbol or instantly recognisable representation of something else. The Eiffel Tower makes sense – it can be used to represent Paris. Uluru can stand for the Australian Outback. The Hollywood sign can stand for LA. They’re all genuinely iconic.

Some overpriced restaurant with a relatively big name chef, however, is not iconic in the slightest. Neither is a luxury hotel with a tenacious marketing department. And neither is some church, beach or building that most people have never heard of.

If you have to explain what something is or looks like, it is by definition not iconic. Thus to bang on for 400 words about something ‘iconic’ becomes an almost instantaneous tautology.

This doesn’t stop travel writers doing it, though, when what they really mean is “quite popular”, “quite good” or “has been around for a bit”.

Vibrant and bustling are instant signs of a writer who’s a bit too old for the third world backpacker thing, but doesn’t want to admit that they’d prefer something a bit more upmarket and relaxed.

And, yes, I have used them myself in that context…

They also tend to be used by people that don’t appear to know what either word means. Perhaps to indicate a large amount rather than a wide variety, or maybe tautologously – as in “the breakfast at my Scandinavian hotel truly was a veritable smorgasbord.”