Rudy Maxa is on a plane this morning from Orlando to St. Paul and from there heads off to India for a National Geographic Traveler assignment. So we're doing today's discussion with Rudy as a four-part Q&A. In part one, we talk to Rudy about how he got started as a travel writer and onair commentator and his early days as an online travel personality.
Do you remember the item you did in 1972 at the Washington Post... the one about the tribulations of driving across the Pennsylvania Turnpike to visit relatives in Ohio? Was that your first travel story?
I suppose it might have been, though I didn’t think of it as a travel story at the time. It was a satirical column—a two-parter, I think—on how miserable driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike was. (I’d had to traverse it many times while attending college in Ohio.) Anyway, my words appeared in a slot the Post earmarked for voluntary, staff contributions. The only requirement was that the column had to be humorous. I contributed as often as I could because it meant $75 extra in my paycheck.
You did many other kinds of writing in those early days, from investigative reporting to a successful Washington gossip column. What led you to focus on travel?
The first 22 years of my career in journalism—13 at the Washington Post, nine at the monthly city magazine, Washingtonian—were mainly spent doing investigative articles, magazine pieces and personality or gossip—to use the term loosely—columns. I grew up as an Army brat, traveling widely, and I always loved to travel. I contributed the occasional travel article to the Post but never saw travel writing as anything more than a sideline.
But about 14 years ago, a producer named J.J. Yore from a relatively new, Los Angeles-based, public radio business show called “Marketplace” called me and asked if I’d be interested in doing some political commentary for the show. A couple of minutes every two weeks for, I think, $75 a pop. I told him I really wasn’t interested in being a political commentator. I really think you have to have a partisan fire in your belly—like a Pat Buchanan, for example—to be an effective commentator. As a reporter, I didn’t much care who was in the political center ring, just as long as they were entertaining. Which is to say, just as long as they and their cronies lent themselves to good stories.
J.J. was persistent, however. In one phone call, he asked me if I had any interests. All I could think of was my love of travel. Back in those days, airlines routinely bought full-page ads in major newspapers touting fares, but I think I was one of the very few guys who read the agate type at the bottom of those ads. So when friends would say, “You know, you can fly from DC to LA for $85!” I was always the guy who would say, “Not so fast—you have to be a Libra born on Monday to qualify for THAT fare.” And I was often surprised at how otherwise well-educated men and women became helpless while on the road. They had no idea how to read an airline ticket, didn’t know how frequent flyer programs really worked, and didn’t know their rights if something went wrong while traveling.
So I suggested I do a consumer-oriented travel commentary, an idea that J.J. found uninspiring, to say the least. I recall him saying, “But we’re a BUSINESS show.” And I said something along the lines of, “Well, yeah, but travel is big business and business people travel.”
We ended the conversation with J.J. suggesting I send him a dozen or so ideas for commentaries and he’d get back to me. Not.
Well, for reasons I’m still not certain of, I did send J.J. some ideas. And he called me back a while later to say he and the home office staff were interested in a couple of the topics. I think I remember him asking how a passenger could get into first class without buying a first class ticket. And why no one should drink the water on an airplane.
My friend Peter Greenberg, now the travel editor for the “Today Show,” was then writing a consumer travel column for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate titled “The Savvy Traveler.” I liked the name, asked him if I could use it for radio only, and he kindly agreed. And that’s the long answer as to how I got into travel journalism.
Your travel persona seemed to really take flight with your fist online travel program on AOL, which was sponsored by American Express. Can you tell us about those early days with AOL and the transition to the World Wide Web?
After a year or so as the Savvy Traveler, I got a call from Worth magazine asking if I’d write on travel topics for them. American Express was beginning a session on a fairly unknown on-line service called America On Line, and Amex asked if I’d write a weekly what’s-hot-in-travel column and answer on-line questions.
So, yes, when I had to begin writing weekly for the American Express site (back then, AOL was a closed system—you couldn’t go out onto the Internet through it, hard as that may be to believe today).
Then J.J. and his colleagues secured an pretty good-sized grant--$800,000 or so, I think-- from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to launch a one-hour version of the Savvy Traveler with me as host. Then I really had to get serious about travel. And, at the same time, other magazine-writing opportunities started coming in, and I slowly morphed from Washington scandal and magazine writer to a travel guy in print and on radio.
Tell us about the European travel series you've been doing for PBS. Are you using blogs or other online media in connection with your show?
About five years ago, a Seattle-based production company named Small World called, and co-owner John Givens asked if I’d be interested in hosting a new series of TV shows on Europe. He and his colleagues had spent ten years launching and producing the Rick Steves travel shows on public television, but now he wanted to go a bit more upscale in content and focus more on food and wine.
Today, we have 39 episodes of “Smart Travels: Europe with Rudy Maxa” airing on most public television stations in the US. Another 13 new shows make their debut next month, giving us 52 shows on the air. (Details: www.smarttravels.tv) A version of the shows, re-edited for commercial television, air regularly on the Fine Living channel, and several High-Definition networks also broadcast the shows over and over. We were the first Hi-Def series to air on PBS stations.
Oh, and retail, DVD versions of the shows, re-named “Europe To the Max,” go on sale in Costco and other large retailers as well as on Amazon.com, next month.
We have not launched any blogs. I have my own web site, www.rudymaxa.com, that launched years ago in connection with my (late, great) monthly travel newsletter. (I shut the newsletter down a year ago because I got tired of losing money). You can still access past articles, and I try to keep it up-to-date with travel news and late-breaking deals, but sometimes I fall behind.
I haven’t blogged because I’m overbooked with writing assignments as is, and the thought of doing a blog overwhelms me.
