When travel copy becomes sickening

An over-the-top press release about a luxury hotel gets us thinking about the language of excess

It’s dessert time in an old-school restaurant. You order the chocolate cake. The waiter asks if you’d like double cream or ice cream with it.

‘Both!’ you say. 

You call him back.

‘I also want a side of sticky toffee pudding. And maybe a meringue with white chocolate sauce on top’.

While your insides squirm, let me show you the verbal equivalent of the dish I’ve just described.

The Ritz-Carlton Amman will bring an unparalleled world of luxuriously crafted experiences and a new standard of refined hospitality to Jordan’s vibrant capital. Soaring 20-stories high and situated on the prestigious Fifth Circle, The Ritz-Carlton, Amman features 226 guestrooms, including 34 opulent suites intricately designed and stunningly furnished, with a sophisticated ambiance permeating the entire property. Guests can relax in the elegant Cigar Lounge or indulge in distinguished cuisine at the hotel’s Mediterranean restaurant. For a dinner with a view, the rooftop restaurant and bar offer dazzling views across the skyline. The enchanting towers offer both indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a fitness centre and spa, along with a 1,000 square metre ballroom.

That’s from a Marriott Bonvoy press release I’ve just received about the mega-group’s new openings. 

It caught my eye because the opening was pretty punchy: AVOID THE SUMMER TRAVEL CHAOS WITH THESE HOT NEW HOTEL OPENINGS. It talks about ‘chaos’ in the travel industry and urges us to try these ‘off the beaten track’ destinations, including Amman.

But then the writer goes off-the-scale calorific. 

When too many words say too little

The Ritz-Carlton, Amman: a bit of a soar point

They go all in with an unparalleled world of luxuriously crafted experiences. Wow. No small claim. Judging from the website (a dangerous thing to do, admittedly) it is a lovely hotel.  But you don’t get unparalleled very often. The Savoy when it opened in 1889? The Burj Al Arab in 1999? I think we’d find quite a few parallels for the Ritz-Carlton Amman, not least within the R-C’s own portfolio.

Everyone in travel is all about experiences just now, so the press release writers needed to get that one in. Oh, and crafted: things must be crafted in 2022. But the marketing team signing off this copy thought that ‘crafted experiences’ alone was a bit bare: we’re not Hoxton, you know. So they become luxuriously crafted. And so we sprinkle a liberal tablespoon of sugar on our chocolate-cake-with-double-cream-with-ice-cream-with-meringue-and-sticky-toffee-pudding. 

I could go on. In fact (to paraphrase Bill Bryson) I will. Note what the writer does with a simple statement of fact. The hotel is 20 stories high. It’s not that big, nor that small. But no, it has to ‘soar’. The suites? They aren’t just opulent, they are intricately designed and stunningly furnished…..and even that isn’t enough, because they have something called  a sophisticated ambiance, too, which permeates the entire property. 

Does A&E have a ward dealing with urgent admissions for people suffering from an overdose of adjectives and adverbs?

You’re desperate to suck on a lemon by now, but plough on you must, through dazzlings and enchantings and even a distinguished. 

What’s going on here?

I checked the rate for a regular suite: just over $2,600. It’s as if this luxuriant verbiage is included in the price. A plain statement of fact is all a bit entry-level.

But note – and we will often come back to this –  how little information and substance you find in this paragraph. In literary terms, these words are all empty calories. You stuff your face with them, but end up feeling weirdly unsatisfied.

We don’t know anything about who designed the suites, what inspired them, what materials they use, any of the details that go into making that stunning, opulent intricacy.

Or is it intricately stunning opulence? 

Expensive but insubstantial

The Forthwrite List of Banned Travel Words

As editors of features sections and travel magazines in our past lives, both Kerry Smith and I loved a Banned List. We’d pin up the offending terms on the wall so everyone could see what should not be seen in our copy.

What is Substack if not a wall? We’ll be sharing a few of our least favourites in these newsletters. 

Banned word 1: ‘VIBRANT’

Could be anywhere

 Our Ritz-Carlton writer has it in: of course they do. Jordan’s vibrant capital.

You will struggle to find any capital city anywhere – indeed, any city – that doesn’t get the v-word attached to it. 

It’s hard to be sure when urban centres began vibrating so much. We’ve a suspicion it was about the time men started wearing long beards and instead of taking their coffee black or white, they took it very, very seriously. 

Now, more or less any neighbourhood in any town where more than half a dozen people meet and the decibel level is above that of the average tearoom gets to be ‘vibrant’. 

Like a lot of overused adjectives, this one has to do a lot of work. It’s a synonym for ‘progressive’, a euphemism for ‘chaotic’ and an alternative to the simple word ‘busy’. 

Sometimes, travel clichés become such a standing joke that even the corporates stop using them. This happened to ‘city (or country) of contrasts’, a once-ubiquitous term that finally began to die out in the 2010s when people began to realise that it’s a pretty rare city or country that doesn’t have any contrasts.

Can we just agree that urban centres are likely to be ‘vibrant’ and cut the word count by one?

More on the art of writing about hotels

The Forthwrite team has written and edited content – magazines, newsletters, social media and websites – for hotel groups including Mandarin Oriental, Best Western, Dolce, the Dorchester Group and CBRE. We offer tailor-made courses for copywriters and PR/ communications teams on writing that will make your audience sit up, take notice and get booking.

We are here.