Crestline resident launches Healthy Travel magazine

A spa day is on the itinerary for Alison Lewis and her 14-year-old daughter’s spring break trip to the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. In February, the Crestline resident was at Blackberry Farm, and in April she’ll be in St. Barths, followed by a trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

These days, the travel journalist gets asked daily to go on an all-expense-paid press trip, and she carefully selects her travels, one trip each month, based on her kids’ schedules.

Her life might seem like a dream, but Lewis, a single mom of three, said it’s hard work. She has been working 80-90 hours a week, keeping up her culinary clientele with Ingredients, Inc., the business she started in 2002. At the same time, she has been launching a new magazine, Healthy Travel, to debut this month.

Lewis dreamed up, wrote and produced each page of the quarterly publication’s first issue. Its pages are filled with features on healthy women’s getaways, beaches and ski resorts, golf destinations, as well as regular departments on fashion, beauty, family trips, romantic trips and culinary opportunities.

For years, Lewis had been a food professional. She worked as food editor at Southern Living, started a culinary consulting business Ingredients Inc. and a blog by the same name (ingredientsinc.net), and authored two cookbooks.

But recently, with a down economy and an increasing number of self-taught food bloggers being hired for what she was trained to do, Lewis set out to diversify her career. Her aspiration: travel writing. And it was her network that got her there.

While speaking on blogging at Atlanta Food and Wine Festival in 2010, someone from CNN asked her to go on all-expense-paid press trip to Italy with journalists from CNN, National Geographic and The New York Times. Lewis was the only journalist on the trip tweeting and sharing their experiences with her social media. This trip would lead to many more. She started “Tuesday Travel” on her blog and began finding other publishing outlets for her travel experiences.

This new area of writing brought back an idea Lewis had while she was at Southern Living: what about a travel magazine geared toward health? On each trip she went on, she saw health-oriented things that would make great features for such a publication.

“This is clearer than ever,” she thought.

Lewis did not tell anyone about the idea until early 2012, when she ended up chatting on the beach (on a press trip, of course) with Gina Christman, publisher of Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles. The two hit it off, and Lewis was soon pitching Christman on Healthy Travel and all the advertisers it would draw. Christman offered to present the idea the following week, and within months Lewis was bringing her magazine vision to life as its editor in chief.

The spring issue of Healthy Travel is an insert in the March issue of Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles and other magazines by the publisher, and from there the publisher will determine if it can stand on its own. With all the ads for the first issue sold and three-quarters sold by early February for the second issue, it certainly seems a viable venture even for something as risky as a magazine launch.

Lewis said her kids, Alec (15), Leigh (14) and Zachary (12), have been pretty amazed by seeing their mom’s idea come to reality.

“It shows them that if you have a dream or if you come up with a great idea, you have to see it through,” she said.