Vacationers to New England keep guidebooks on the press

By Bruce Mohl, Globe Staff, 07/21/02

		Get a state guide  Sensible traveler  Destinations  Where they went  Travel gear  Student travel

Travel information may be migrating to the Internet at a rapid pace, yet the old-fashioned state vacation guide remains a staple for visitors to New England.

Sensible travelers increasingly order their guides online, but they want a hefty magazine in hand for planning a trip and hitting the road. The New England guides are big, ranging from 120 pages (Vermont) to 262 pages (Maine). More than 2 million guides were printed this year in the six New England states, and they will all be gone in a few months.

The guides encapsulate what each state believes it has to offer. Maine features a lighthouse on its cover, New Hampshire a moose, Connecticut, children on a beach. Rhode Island's cover looks out on Newport's harbor from a bed and breakfast, Massachusetts highlights the Public Garden in Boston, and Vermont casts its spotlight on a tranquil farm.

The covers do what they are supposed to do — draw us in — but they are not overly imaginative. None of them grab the eye the way Celine Dion does on the cover of Quebec's promotional literature.

Perhaps the biggest drawback of the guides is that they are all creatures of state government and tend to treat their subject matter like a government program. Each section of the state sounds fantastic and gets its own writeup, whether it's really worth visiting or not. Several states even rotate their cover photographs each year to make sure each section of the state is fairly represented.

Politics also plays a role. The Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecticut guides feature a picture of and a letter from the governor. Connecticut's guidebook is the gaudiest, with a full-page color photograph of Governor John G. Rowland and his wife, Patricia, in front of the Mark Twain House in Hartford. By contrast, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont skip the governor's greeting. The Rhode Island book doesn't even mention Governor Lincoln C. Almond.

"The governor doesn't want it to appear to be a political piece," said Mark Brodeur, director of operations at the Rhode Island Tourism Division.

Despite their limitations, the guidebooks are a good starting point for any trip. They cover a lot of ground very fast and offer helpful tips if you want to dig deeper. Most of the guidebooks come with maps and reams of things-to-do listings.

"It's highly functional," said Jonathan Hyde, the project director on the Massachusetts guidebook and a deputy director at the state office of travel and tourism. "It gives you a lot of information in a way that's easy to understand."

The format is pretty much the same for every state's guidebook. Some eye-catching photographs and graphics up front, with some articles on things to do and places to see. As you move further back in each guidebook, the content devolves into listings of attractions and finally page after page of ads.

"I think if you'd look at the guidebooks of all 50 states, you'd see they're all pretty much the same," said Lauri Klefos, director of the New Hampshire division of travel and tourism. "The visitor needs what the visitor needs. It doesn't really matter where they're going."

Still, some of the guidebooks offer distinctive touches. Both the Vermont and Maine books offered helpful suggestions for what to do with children. Maine had several "don't miss" articles that urged travelers to visit specific sites.

The Massachusetts book offered a surprisingly detailed historical context for the many sites to see in Boston and surrounding towns. The "Road to Fun" feature was clever and well illustrated, but at times went a bit overboard with pop culture pitches for the Cheers bar and Gloucester as the fishing port made famous by Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm."

New Hampshire's book had several interesting features, including an article on famous American homes and gardens. My favorite was the trip planner, which offered several pages of practical information, including a breakdown by each region of the state of radio stations and the music they play.

All of the guidebooks seem a bit top-heavy with advertising, particularly the Rhode Island and Connecticut books. The ads outnumber the editorial content undoubtedly because the cash-strapped states are trying to keep expenses to a minimum.

Every state except Maine invests some money in its guidebook, but the advertising keeps the taxpayer cost surprisingly small. Hyde said Massachusetts, which prints 1 million copies of its guide book, spent a total of $113,000, which works out to a meager 11 cents a copy.

Maine, by contracting the book out to the Maine Tourism Association, spends no tax dollars on its book. Vaughn Stinson, executive director of the nonprofit association, said careful management is needed to keep costs down, including printing the magazine in Pennsylvania the last two years.

One way for all six New England states to save money on guidebooks would be to print one guide for the entire region. Klefos of New Hampshire, for example, notes visitors to the region rarely stay in one place; they typically visit two or three states. The region already jointly markets itself abroad. Why not domestically?

That's not a good idea, say state tourism officials with a united voice. Many of the people asking for state guidebooks are from New England already. Maine, for example, gets a third of its guide book requests from Massachusetts.

"Massachusetts residents don't want to read about Massachusetts," Stinson said. "They want details about Maine."

Bruce Mohl can be reached by e-mail at mohl@globe.com.