I am an international travel writer, and the guidebooks to which I contribute will henceforth carry a corporate health warning. Readers of the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet books will be advised to think before they fly because the impact of flying on global warming should, well, give them pause for thought. Both publishers have pledged money to Climate Care, a limited company, for projects designed to offset the greenhouse gas emissions caused by their globetrotting researchers.

Travellers will be urged to consider slower, more environmentally friendly ways of reaching their destination. This effectively restricts residents of Australia (where Lonely Planet is based) to cruise ships, which might spend 55 days crossing the ocean from Fremantle to Liverpool. A fortnight’s holiday in, say, Paris, would take almost four months.

It would be a leisurely, rewarding journey, if you had the time and the money to make it. If, for instance, you were a guidebook publisher who, having seen the world on the cheap, had suddenly decided other people should not do the same. By ‘other people’, I mean, of course, Other People: men and women with real jobs and rent to pay, who can’t afford a gap year or an overland odyssey. And you know what? They’re no great loss. It’s not as if they go to the art galleries anyway. A holiday for them is a stag party in Tallinn, with 70p pints and £10 prostitutes. It is these frivolous, short-term stays, made possible by cheap flights on no-frills airlines, that the guidebook publishers are most concerned about.

‘I’m certainly cutting down on casual travel,’ Rough Guides’ founder Mark Ellingham told the Guardian. ‘If someone invited me to a stag party in Prague, I wouldn’t go – what’s wrong with Bournemouth?’ Well, the Rough Guides website entry for Prague says, ‘Few other cities, anywhere in Europe, look as good…[Prague is] very beautiful…smothered in a rich mantle of Baroque, Rococo and Art Nouveau’. The (rather shorter) section on Bournemouth calls it a ‘blandly modern town’. Exploring the public gardens, however, ‘can easily fill a day’. But who cares? Because it’s just a stag party, right? It’s hardly a Grand Tour. If you live north of Oxford (God forbid!), it’s cheaper and quicker to fly to Prague than to catch a train to Bournemouth – but you’ve got all the time in the world, right?

Alastair Sawday, a member of the Soil Association and the publisher of the Special Places to Stay guidebooks, told The Bristol Magazine, ‘we don’t encourage long-haul journeys’, but he publishes a guide to India from his carbon neutral offices in Long Ashton. How does he expect people to get to Mumbai? The overland route through Afghanistan? ‘People travelled long before cars and aeroplanes came along,’ says Sawday. That’s true, but working class people didn’t.

There are two not always distinct fears about cheap air travel. The first is the environmentalist contention that the expected 300 per cent increase in flights over the next 20 years will ruin the planet. The second is the worry that hoards of chavs in football shirts will ruin the planet, pissing in Latvian fountains, drunkenly trampling a rich cultural heritage which hardly anybody knew about until 15 years ago. Cheap flights spread hooliganism, destroy the environment and erode traditional ways of life.

The same has been said about everything that has made travel easier, cheaper and safer for ordinary people, all the way back to the bicycle. Geoffrey Pearson (1983) in Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears describes widespread ‘grumbling against the tendency of the working class to assert its noisome presence in places where it clearly had no right to go’ during the bicycle craze of the 1890s. The Times criticised young worker cyclists ‘dashing along quiet country roads and through peaceful villages with loud shouts and sulphurous language, and reckless of life and limb’. It was held that male cyclists could become infertile due to the pressure on their testes, and that cycling could cause horrific new ailments such as bicycle face, bicycle hand, bicycle foot and cyclist’s hump. (And many environmentalists, including Alastair Sawday, do indeed seem to develop bicycle face.)

More recently, flying long-haul in economy class was blamed for deep vein thrombosis (DVT), or ‘economy class syndrome’. A South African study showed the risks were overstated and that DVT was just as likely to occur in first and business class as economy. Farrol Kahn, director of the non-profit Aviation Health Institute (AHI), said, ‘It affects people throughout the whole aircraft…We’ve had deaths reported in flying beds, for example,’ but it will be a hot day in the Antarctic (perhaps provided by global warming) before the media panic about ‘flying bed syndrome’.

The modern concept of tourism stems from the Grand Tour, traditionally taken by young eighteenth-century gentlemen to complete their education. They would visit the great museums, commission landscapes of Venice from Canaletto, learn French or Italian, and have sex with exotic hookers. The Grand Tour was as much a sex tour as any lads weekend in Vilnius. Venice was known as ‘the brothel of Europe’. James Boswell, the diarist and ninth Laird of Auchinleck, justified his use of prostitutes in Rome with a nod to the classics: ‘I remembered the rakish deeds of Horace and those other amorous Roman poets,’ he wrote, ‘and I thought that one might well allow one’s self a little indulgence in a city where there are prostitutes licensed by the Cardinal Vicar’. Had Boswell been an arc welder from twenty-first century Scotland, he might have written: ‘I remembered reading about Estonian birds in Hustler, and I thought I might as well get my leg over in a place where I wouldn’t get nicked for kerb-crawling’.

The working class had their part to play in the Grand Tour. Teams of them carried men such as Boswell over Alpine passes, suspended in sedan chairs (a form of transport that left no ecological footprint). Traditionally, however, they only saw the world in armies of conquest, or crusades (both of which seem to be coming back into fashion). When they followed the example of their betters and signed up for the first package tours, they were widely despised. At the turn of the twentieth century, John Ruskin spoke of ‘stupid herds of modern tourists…poor modern slaves and simpletons, who let themselves be dragged like cattle…through the countries they imagine themselves visiting’. Ruskin and Boswell are both quoted in Lynne Withey’s (1997) Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours. Withey notes that, as mass travel began to take shape, the rich fled to first class cabins and exclusive resorts: ‘Tourism became organised increasingly along class lines, distinguished not only by money but also by time…Slower travel became luxury travel’.

And it still is. The kind of lingering experience preferred by guidebook publishers (which, incidentally, is the type of travel most likely to require a guidebook) is simply not open to most ordinary people. If they were paid higher wages and given longer holidays they could afford to spend longer abroad. This is particularly true of guidebook writers. Some publishers pay their writers a fixed fee – from which all expenses are deducted – based on a notional number of days ‘on the road’. The rates are low and the estimated research times short. Writers are effectively forced to either travel slowly and earn a paltry day rate, or remain within their fixed time limit by taking exactly the kind of cheap flights their publishers claim to abhor.

The answer, apparently, is for businesses to plant more trees. This is a fine idea. Trees are ecological miracles, make beautiful scenery and are great for sheltering under (except during thunderstorms). But the publishers are on dodgy ground when they advise readers against ‘frivolous’ travel, since they have little intention of slowing down themselves. Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler (interviewed in London on a business trip from Melbourne) said, ‘I’m not going to stop, but every time I jump on a plane I think, “Oh no, I’m doing it again”’. Perhaps they don’t expect working people to stop going on holiday, they just want them to feel bad about it. (This would fit fairly comfortably in the environmentalists’ modus operandi). Or maybe they hope they will stay at home and read guidebooks instead.

Mark Khazar is a travel writer

Pearson, G. (1983). Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Withey, L. (1997). Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750-1915. New York, William Morrow & Co.