In a recent Q&A for an indescribably ugly publication called Real Travel, Simon Calder advised anyone thinking of going into travel journalism not to waste his or her time. “It’s an industry that has huge over-supply,” he warned, “so the last thing you want to do is try and rely on it to make a living.” Yet the reason there are so few jobs is, in part, because Simon Calder has most of them. In addition to occupying the role of senior editor and “the man who pays his way” at The Independent, he writes columns for an assortment of magazines, regularly pops up on Radio 4’s Excess Baggage, and is invariably the hard-talking pundit the networks pull out of the drawer every time a strike is announced, a tour operator collapses, or a plane goes down.

In his defence, Calder has been in the business for ages, and his brand of confident, slightly geeky, information-centred travel journalism fills a useful gap. About as close as any journalist could ever get to being a “celebrity” travel pundit, he is industrious and fairly harmless to the rest of us. Still, his industriousness reminds us that journalism is unique in the world of careers because of the degree of moonlighting that goes on. Someone should do a survey to see who has the most jobs. Paxman? Humphrys? Jonathan Ross? The ethics of the Beeb, the newspapers, all the news media industries seem to be: why employ 10 people on fair wages when you can pay one person far more?

Far lower down the journalistic pecking order, the same is true. Like most travel journalists, I do a mixed bag of jobs. I have written and edited travel guides (it pays about the same as nursing, but is easier), produced copy for commercial clients, reviewed hotels and resorts, and produced advertorials and so-called “sponsored editorial” in supplements paid for by foreign tourist boards, tour operators and coffee producers. And I have done hundreds of features for various editors – they get fired, or get bored with you, or get pissed off with a bit of cheek, and you move on somewhere else.

I am not exceptionally productive. I know a travel journalist who spends part of his time editing a magazine in Hungary (he commutes from London to Budapest), and the rest of it reviewing bars, pubs, hotels and trains, and writing travel guides or advertorial copy for whomever will pay. Some nights he sleeps on the office floor of one of his main paymasters, just to save on commuting and time wasting. He has a child in Brighton; he has no life.

Now, celebrity multi-taskers do all those jobs, I assume, possibly for genuine interest, certainly for lots of money and perhaps for additional fame. My friend does it because he has no fame and he is so poorly paid he has to do a thousand odd jobs. So who is stealing all the wages in between? Well, quite a few people actually, because aspiring travel writers with a flair for features face insidious competition from unpaid and underpaid young freelances, from fellow writers, from editors and editors’ friends and family – and from celebs from right across the alphabet of talent.

■ CELEBRITY WRITERS: Let’s consider the worst first: the celeb retirees and wasters who, having seen their careers in acting, telling jokes, broadcasting and the arts go down the pan, decide to get their weary agents to call up a travel desk on a newspaper. It’s very rare you get A-list celebrities, or anyone used to being very well paid for that matter, offering travel journalism. But TV exposure and a free holiday amount to significant PR even for the likes of Ewan McGregor, and both the mediocre Long Way Round and the utterly dull Long Way Downhave been very successful free holidays for the Star Wars star and his less well-known actor friend, Charley Boorman.

But television, annoyingly, creates a sort of benchmark for print journalism. The McGregor-and-Palin factor dribbles down to the broadsheets and even into the otiose travel sections in the tabs. Talent, humour, knowledge, audience awareness and other things that pros take for granted are of no matter when it comes to celeb travel. Pros don’t whinge on about visas, delays, their private life – but celebs do. Pros don’t plug their “other products” – celebs do. Pros check facts, keep notes, investigate – celebs don’t. Yet celebs expect a higher fee, business-class flights and all the trimmings – pros can’t.

In the last year I’ve noted features by actress Imogen Stubbs and “my companion” in the Grenadines for the Telegraph; Isabel Fonseca (wife of Martin Amis, in case you’re wondering) on Argentina in The Guardian; Castaway-spawned broadcaster Ben Fogle on Venezuela in The Independent; and actor Sam Riley on “his hometown of Berlin” on Guardian Online. Then there’s Rory Bremner cracking jokes in Oman, and Frances Barber and Sir Ian McKellen on Bintan in Indonesia during “a break in a world tour of The Seagull” – now what’s that about?

As one senior editor on a national paper commented about a rival: “You might look at the Mail on Sunday’s use of so-called celebrities. A while back they had Valerie Singleton, who was billed as “former Blue Peter presenter”. That seems to me to sum up the pointlessness of our obsession. If she was famous, or is still famous, you wouldn’t need to draw attention to what she used to do. If she’s not famous any more, why pretend she is? What does it add to a travel piece?” Another Blue Peter veteran, Peter Duncan, did the same for The Guardian (“Jordan is a friendly country,” he observed), simultaneously plugging a Channel 5 TV show starring his travel companion, his son. Other disasters have been Stanley Johnson (Boris’s dad) on Baja California in Mexico, former Toploader guitarist Dan Hipgrave on Ecuador and, perhaps deserving a green eco-award for putting anyone off travel forever, former foreign secretary Margaret (“I am very pleased to see that caravanning remains as popular today as it was when I started out”) Beckett. Travel editors are not like music or arts editors or even those who commission features for the supplements. Tied mainly to their desks, they hardly ever get to meet anyone glamorous or even slightly famous. Depressingly, many of them seem keen on steering their pages in whatever direction suits their address book. Do they really think some celebrity glitter will sparkle up their pages or their lives? Do they not grasp that anyone from the stage, telly, movies or books is only pitching a travel feature because they hope they’ll get a free trip and a free front-page mega-advertisement? Or is it just that the ads department comes down every afternoon and begs: “Please turn your next jungle story into an “I’m a Celebrity”-style feature. We’ll sell acres more ads.” Either way, it’s grim for the reader – and dispiriting for the real travel writer.

What, though, is lost? Well, some objectivity, lots of honesty, all kinds of knowledge, and, above all, good writing – ask any sub who has to deal with the copy that comes in from most celebs. Also lost is ten inches of newsprint space that a talented travel journalist could have filled.

■ THE ENEMY WITHIN: So, imagine there is still someone left who thinks travel writing might be fun, creative, exciting, worth doing. He or she wades through the piles of supplements on a Saturday and, eventually, finds the sections. They’ll soon notice that many of the few feature-length gaps not filled by stories by, or interviews with, low-rung celebs, are filled by staff journalists, some of whom aspire to a kind of impoverished celebrity, while others are backroom boys and girls with a perhaps understandable itch to get out of the office. Highly-paid staffers enjoy nothing better than a freebie holiday, so you get the likes of Peter McKay, Quentin Letts and countless others moving into the travel pages.

Grovelling apology

At best, this copy often comes in with a few factual errors or sloppy observations. At worst, it is written up during a hangover on the flight home and culled from a guidebook. Because everyone had to do a “My holiday” essay at school, all journalists think they can knock off a quick travel feature without much trouble. Yet Guardian Travel had to spike a story by one of its star staff writers because simply it was unpublishable. “He accepted the job as a family jolly,” an insider told me. “But all he delivered was a piece on his school holiday trip.”

Office “favours”, nepotism and a general decline in standards are not the only factors lining up against a would-be travel professional. Classic travel features – meaning those containing narrative, colour, creativity, inquiry – are being replaced by reader tips, lists of suggestions and thinly disguised advertorial puffs and plugs for tour operators. Often the pressure comes from the marketing department, via the editor or department head, and travel editors are rarely heavyweights willing to take on the newsroom hierarchy.

From a production point of view, writing little reviews and lists is simply unprofitable. Most freelances do not get – nor want – reams of press releases. So if they are asked to produce, say, “20 Sporty Breaks in Europe” (usually within the next 24 hours or less), they have to call around tourist boards and operators, browse the net for ages and explore dozens of ideas before choosing the best. They will be lucky, after all this, to get a mention anywhere in the four pages within which the final top 100 appears – and then they’ll get paid pennies, probably on a pence-per-word basis. There is no money for the time taken, the research or the cost of the phone calls. This might just about be acceptable as work for rich amateurs, fresh interns or drudges, but I’m not even sure about that.

The growth of newspaper and magazine websites – and the need to keep information short and utilitarian – means this trend is on the increase. As websites also adore readers’ tips, we are seeing the gradual erosion of real journalism in the ether – why pay someone for a hotel review when you can get five free (even if one of the hotels is a hell-hole and owned by the reviewers’ best mate)?

Guardian Travel already gives a full-page spread to its readers, and all newspapers and most periodicals are now talking about “monetising” their travel section websites, attracting ad revenue and, quite possibly, commission on travel agency bookings by making all their travel stories, reports and photographs available online. But no one has a failsafe way of measuring how hits and reads actually relate to ad income or to a holiday booking, thus weakening the hand of travel section editors when they discuss budgets, and making writers very vulnerable. The day may come when a journalist is told: “No we’re not covering Venezuela this year, because it doesn’t generate hits or holidays.” Editors are also keen to complement online travel copy with video footage and podcasts, though few seem to have created any funds with which to pay regular freelance writers to learn to make either of these. And I have yet to hear the word “fee” mentioned in the same sentence as: “Would you mind taking this huge camera half-way round the world?” The apologists call it synergy; it is, if we are to be polite, cheap and often second-rate copy, and amateur video film dressed up as web telly.

■ IT’S NO HOLIDAY: Money is at the heart of the rocky future of travel journalism. UK media pay from 15p to 50p a word, depending who and what the copy is for. There is no limit on how small a report can be. I once went to Mallorca to write an in-brief item on a £1,000,000 motor yacht and was paid £12. But the job sometimes costs a lot. If you stay up all night at Stansted you can shave off some expenditure, but if you have a modicum of dignity and a private life, you may have to get a cab at dawn (£50-plus from South London to Heathrow), buy a visa (as much as £150 for exotic destinations, and incrementally rising if you book close to your departure date), and then have to add on lots of seemingly minor costs at the other end – buy some snacks, make a few international calls, get mugged by some urchins, and you can see how even a “junket” can get quite costly. Yet many media corporations refuse to pay any of this, and all have a strict ceiling on what they will provide in terms of expenses irrespective of where you are headed and what you might be doing (i.e. spending) when you get there.

To get a story in print you have successfully to pitch the idea with a tour operator (beg, persuade, cajole, generally waste lots of time) and then sell it on to an editor. Some are wonderful, well-travelled, plainly nice people. Others are not. In any case, there are few worthwhile relationships in this business – editors come and go and they have their own faves. Many editors have other editors as friends – flick between the glossies and the newspapers and you will see how X has a regular travel news column in Y’s pages, while X hands his pal the commissions for skiing stories. There are also editors who use their spouses to pen stories, when not taking them on their own trips. Keep it in the family has long been the creed of journalism and in the travel sections the dynasties are stronger than ever.

All of this is allowed to happen because journalists – and their emasculated unions – are unwilling to challenge the status quo. What is bad in journalism generally is worse in travel journalism (and this may go for other “light” feature-based sections of our ever-expanding newspapers). Somehow, the job is treated as “soft”, even “girlie” – and it is certainly full of Francescas and Tamsins who like the bit of glam they can glean from being in 5-star hotels in culture-free It-destinations such as Dubai.

I accept the dilemma that there are too many of us in this area of the business. I also think there are too many outlets. Does that sound like a contradiction? It isn’t – and here’s why: in the last couple of years I have penned guide-type copy on Buenos Aires – a place I know well – for Time Out, Lonely Planet, DK Penguin, just about all the quality press, dozens of tour operators and small-publication magazines and countless brochure-type media. And, let’s face it, it’s all been the same guff. If I’m doing it, so is everyone else, I imagine. The proliferation of media, especially online, means everyone is stealing from everyone else. In short, Condé Nast Traveller magazine, for example, pays for a trip, then a newspaper lifts an angle from that story, and all the surplus data gets re-used again and again until eventually it appears in a blog or a corner of the Express no one reads. It’s not just that there are too many of us. There is too much media. Too much paper, too many page views and guidebooks and podcasts. Far from creating more jobs, this merely creates a culture of duplication and plagiarism, fudging and short cuts. It’s cheap, sub-standard journalism, not far removed from the free rubbish available on the worst of the blogs and blurbs of the web.

It’s a serious problem and an indictment of the media’s approach to travel. More overpaid amateur-celebrity stories and the grim proliferation of under-valued professional material through random media give us the worst of all worlds. The very best travel stories are a model of journalism. They entertain, they educate (occasionally), they illuminate. The main contemporary issues – the environment, the cultural impact of travel, the economics of the tourist dollar, the horrors of globetrotting and the terror of airport and airplanes – should all command space among the upbeat copy on boutique hotels, delicious food, beautiful landscapes and unique cultures. This, I reckon, could be the model for television, too, and then there would be no more Whickers, Ewans and Palins, and no more celebrity pointlessness. Travel is, after defence, the second biggest industry on the planet. Does it really have to be the smallest kind of journalism?