Byline: PAMELA BLACK

After two years in the dumps, thanks to international strife and disasters, travel magazines are starting to roar back, and three new titles targeting very distinct markets have slipped into the mix. The tony Town & Country is going after the highest of the high-end market, while Travel Savvy targets the young and the hip, and The Out Traveler is out to get the gay voyageur.

Town & Country Travel wants to capture the creme de la creme - the top 10 percent of the travel market. That is, households with average net worth of $2.8 million and average annual income of $270,000. "The goal is to be the most high-end travel magazine on the market," says Jim Taylor, publisher of Town & Country and its travel spin-off. "The travel market is crowded but this segment is booming," he says. "The high-end traveler is spending more for space and safety. They're traveling with the whole family and getting villas and suites."

The magazine is currently being distributed free to the 390,000 T&C subscribers, with another 150,000 issues available on the newsstand. Where the circ winds up after the second free issue in April isn't clear but, with its selective audience, Taylor guesses it will be less than T&C's. The premiere issue, which was launched on September 15, will be the only one for 2003. Next year, the magazine will appear quarterly, in April, June, October, and December.

The modest cover ($4.95) and subscription price ($16) belie the interior's fancy fare. With largish type and seductive pictures, it features sophisticated names such as R.W. Apple, The New York Times correspondent who writes about his return to Vietnam nearly 30 years after he covered the war there. There's an article on making the best pasta in Tuscany, by Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, and an interview with the travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux. Editor Pamela Fiori, formerly EIC at Travel + Leisure, visits three luxury safari lodges in South Africa.

Destinations vary in price throughout the magazine, from $24,750 a day for a party of eight to $2,250 for a four-bedroom condo at Utah's Deer Valley Ski Resort.

What distinguishes Town & Country Travel from the two dominant luxury-travel mags - Travel + Leisure and Conde Nast Traveler - is the exclusivity of the T&C audience. "We're the screen that filters out all that information for the reader and says here are the two or three places to stay at the highest end," says Taylor. With 52 ad pages in a 150-page folio, the Town and Country moniker, and the backing of Hearst behind it, this luxury liner of a book has plenty of ballast to stay the course.

By contrast, Travel Savvy is a jaunty jammer sailing close into the wind, aiming to appeal to the young and hip - a potentially large, untapped audience. Business Traveler veterans Adam Rodriguez, 34, and Gina Masullo, 25, wanted to start a travel magazine that "wasn't the same stale old thing. We found from our research that nearly every national travel magazine targeted a median age of 49 to 55 years," says Rodriquez. "Yet it doesn't cost as much to travel as it used to. We wanted to create a magazine that brought in a younger age group."

With a staff of six and a stable of freelance journalists culled from an ad placed on MediaBistro, the magazine is certainly different from the dominant books in the category. Editorially, Travel Savvy is going for a personal touch, says Masullo: "We wanted the travel to feel firsthand - to tell you the story like you're hearing it from a friend, someone who travels to a destination a lot or lives there, and we wanted to include interviews with travel service types like concierges and flight attendants."

The stories are long on first-person descriptions and are written with a style that succeeds in capturing the small unexpected moments that make travel thrilling. Besides party destinations in Reykjavik and the sociosexuality of traveling in Cuba, the first issue explores Austin, Chicago, and Cape Town. Set in a laid-back but attractive design, longer stories are interspersed with information about quirky travel jaunts, including a visit to the Miss Exotic World annual dance competition in Helendale, Calif. and a rocket festival in rural Thailand to bring on the rains. But Travel Savvy is a tad short on practical information - for example, prices, locations, and how-to-get-theres. "We have the personal connection to a city instead of the rundown-on-where-to-stay service piece," says Masullo.

Rodriquez says his readers' average household income is $75,000 - not exactly the backpacking crowd - and because advertisers such as Virgin Air and W hotels are increasingly spreading out into lifestyle books, Travel Savvy is positioned as a travel lifestyle magazine with fashion, shopping, and food and wine sections.

In part to distinguish itself and to jive with the theme of travel as told by real people, each cover features a celebrity. Of course, celebrity is in the eye of the beholder. The big personality on the cover of the premiere issue is Francois Girbaud, whose achievement includes inventing such fashion styles as bell-bottom and stonewashed jeans. The story about him has little to do with travel. Rodriquez says the story was calculated to coincide with fashion week in New York City and to give the TS launch party maximum publicity.

So far, the bimonthly has printed 100,000 newsstand copies, and Rodriquez hopes to jump to 132 pages in the new year, eventually going monthly. The first 100-page issue has only 17 ad pages, and includes such buyers as Mac cosmetics, Trump Towers, Marriott hotels, and United Airlines. Rodriquez's friends, contacts, and associates privately financed the book, and he says he has enough backing to do a year's worth of issues, providing he gets the ads. The hook for backers is that no one is catering to the youth travel market. "It was just there for free," says Rodriquez.

The premise is valid, says Michael Neiss, managing director of media buying service Lowe Worldwide. "From a travel point of view, there's really no one there. Everyone's going after the upscale first-class traveler," he says. "There are plenty of travel mags, but 27-year-olds are not going to be staying at the Ritz anytime soon."

The third travel debut this fall is The Out Traveler, which is designed to help gay travelers broaden their horizons beyond the "traditional" gay-friendly havens such as Palm Springs and Provincetown. Set to launch in October, The Out Traveler is the latest offering of LPI Media, which also publishes The Advocate and Out. The new quarterly hopes to tap into what market researcher Community Planning says is a $54.1 billion gay tourism market. Planned as a biannual supplement to The Advocate and Out, publisher Joe Landry says the advertiser response was so strong that LPI decided to make it quarterly and test it as a stand-alone magazine in 2004. "Advertisers are looking for new markets, and research came out that said the gay market continues to travel" despite a slump in overall travel, he says. In October, 180,000 copies of the 88-page glossy were sent to subscribers of The Advocate and Out. The first issue contained 34 ad pages, and included buyers such as Louis Vitton, InterContinental Hotels, Landrover, and Avis. Editorially, The Out Traveler features travel tips, news briefs, and consumer-oriented columns. It will try to help gay travelers get their bearings with regular rankings on the gay-friendliness of destinations, including antidiscrimination laws, information about HIV, and the latest news on gay marriage and adoption.

MAG STATS

OTHER LAUNCHES

BKLYN

Launch date: September 2003

Mission: "To make this part of Brooklyn a destination for people from all over the city, not just those from Brooklyn," says publisher Susan Berman. "There's a real energy and momentum that has been building for the last five years or so, and we're trying to capture that energy and spirit, and celebrate it."

Frequency: Quarterly

Target Audience: College-educated, ethnically diverse Brooklyn residents aged 35 to 50, who have a median household income of $75,000.

Initial distribution/circulation: 100,000, with 85,000 copies delivered free to households in central Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, and 15,000 copies available at the six supporting institutions.

Editorial highlights: Premier issue features a list of 10 dishes that offer a "true taste" of Brooklyn, from Cow's Foot Soup to Lamb's Head Three Ways; an article about the best places to spot raptors in the borough; a profile of a Fort Greene clothing designer; and a roster of Brooklyn's best Halloween haunts and festivals.

Ad profile: Full-page, four-color ad is $5,000 to $8,000, depending on frequency and category.

Subscription: Free for residents of Central Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan; $15 for nonresidents.