As the Pacific Asia Travel Association marks its 75th anniversary this month with social media tributes celebrating its glory days, equal recognition should go to the travel media that helped shape and document that era — especially a monthly magazine called PATA Travel News (PTN).
The “new PTN” was relaunched at the PATA Annual Conference in Osaka in May 1987, coinciding with Visit Thailand Year. It complemented TTG Asia , the weekly publication produced by the Asian Business Group.
Although PTN served as the “official publication” of PATA, the editorial team enjoyed near-total freedom in its reporting (see full names of the editorial and marketing teams below). PATA separately produced a newsletter-format publication covering association activities, membership matters and chapter news, which was inserted into the magazine.
Over the years, the team delivered incisive coverage and analysis during what can rightly be called the Golden Age of Asia-Pacific tourism. Topics ranged from the impact of mass-market tourism to the rise of ecotourism and adventure travel, the emergence of women travellers as a market force, the growing influence of technology, and the opening of China.
One particularly far-sighted cover story, which I reported, examined the relationship between politics and tourism — long before geopolitics became today’s dominant flashpoint. Another, also reported by me, analyzed the potential threat posed by the AIDS pandemic, years before SARS, bird flu, and Covid-19 reshaped global travel.
Such high-quality travel journalism was possible because the pioneering PATA leaders of that era were a cut above many of today’s self-styled “visionary thought leaders.” They respected the role of a robust and questioning media, recognising its contribution to elevating the intellectual quality of industry discourse in an operating environment that was changing just as rapidly as it is today.
Presented here are covers from many of the editions I worked on before leaving the group in 1992. As a passionate history buff, I preserved and digitized most of them, although a few were unfortunately lost in the devastating floods that hit Bangkok in 2011.
PTN Asia-Pacific was discontinued in 1998 after the PATA headquarters moved from San Francisco to Bangkok.
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