This is a bad time for the guidebook industry. Sales of print guides have fallen dramatically and the lost revenue hasn’t been replaced by downloads of electronic versions. Look no further than the recent fate of two industry giants. In March 2013, the BBC sold the Lonely Planet brand for $78 million, just 6 years after buying it for nearly $200 million. Google bought the Frommers franchise in August 2012, mined it for social network data, announced that it would no longer print hard copies of guidebooks, then sold it back to the company’s founder. Arthur Frommer said he plans to publish about 40 titles, half of which will only be available as print guides. Frommer’s plan to essentially stay the course with guidebook publishing doesn’t look like a formula for success in today’s market.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of guidebooks. They put everything I need in one place: history, attractions, ideas for places to eat and stay, tips on getting around, etc, all organized in a way that makes it easy (usually) to find. And, the battery won’t die just as you are stepping off the bus in a new city. They are also a good fit for the way my partner and I travel. Most of the time we only have a couple of weeks for a trip. We travel independently and follow a loose itinerary, so we rarely book rooms in advance. On the other hand, it’s not much fun to lose an entire afternoon trying to find a place to sleep, so we bring a guide book to give us an idea of our options.

Guidebooks are far from perfect, of course. The information can get out of date quickly, given the lag time between research and publication, and books can take up a lot of space in a backpack, especially when we’ve traveled through several countries. It also took time to find a brand that travels like we do. We used the Lonely Planet books for a while, but I thought the quality of their work (and writing) had been going down in recent years. (I trace the decline to the company’s decision to quit paying royalties to writers, switching instead to a work-for-hire model in which the content developers—the writers—had much less of a personal stake in the work.)

While it’s comforting to have a guidebook handy in an unfamiliar location, it’s tempting to rely on them too much and miss out on much of the local scene and those spontaneous events that define a trip more than what guesthouse you slept in. While we’ve had moments on trips when we were really grateful for having a guidebook (like getting off a nerve-shattering boat ride from Belize to Guatemala and knowing right away where we could rent an affordable room in Puerto Barrios), there have been places where the guidebook barely left my backpack.

But times have changed and those print guides are on the way out, replaced not by eBook versions of print guides but by Internet-based resources. (While Lonely Planet has offered some of their products as eBooks, many other guidebook publishers have not.) I’ve used web-based resources for some trips—travel within the US mostly—but I find that Internet resources have serious limitations that I can’t get past.

One of the barriers for me is access. I know a lot of people travel with smart phones, but I generally don’t, at least when I travel outside the US. (Even within the US my smart phone is sometimes useless because I often travel to areas where I have no cell signal or data services.) It’s surprisingly easy to get on the Internet in most places around the world today, but if I had to find an Internet café every time I wanted a little guidance, I’d never see the country I came to visit.

I find that using the Internet to research a trip is more time-intensive, too. A single search can turn up more information than I can read through, even for something simple like guesthouses in a specific city. Tracking down the useful bits can be difficult and tedious, especially if I want to compare prices quickly for several guesthouses.

What makes the searching really tedious, though, is that I have to search the web for each specific piece of content I want: where to stay, thoughts about where to eat, how to get around, visa requirements, local history, etc. I’ve browsed through some on-line guides (like Wiki pages) but I find the information uneven and the writing banal (come on; name one time that writing by committee produced something interesting to read); I’m just not willing to rely on it.

The fundamental problem for me, though, is that I have my doubts about the quality and reliability of the information that shows up on my screen. The shift from relying on the “experts” who write guidebooks to anyone with a computer has been astonishingly fast and, while it has its strengths, transparency isn’t one of them. Anyone can post a review for any reason using any identity. When a guidebook is published about a place, you know who wrote it, who’s responsible for it. If you don’t like the product, you can throw it away and check out another publisher or another writer whose identity you will also know.

In the world of user-generated content, though, it doesn’t really work that way. If you read through user reviews of a hotel and find one or two bad reviews for a place with a high overall rating, are you still inclined to stay there or do you keep looking for someplace else? Do you stop to think that those negative reviews (or even the glowing ones) might have been planted by someone whose motivation has nothing to do with providing accurate information for other travelers? Well…you should.

Think about the number of places now where users can post reviews or comments: Yelp, Google, Yahoo, airbnb; really, just about any website that offers travel information has a way for users to offer comments and reviews. The biggest site, at least in terms of traffic, is probably TripAdvisor, which is owned by Expedia (there really isn’t much competition in the on-line travel industry), another site where users can post comments. At how many of those sites have you posted a comment or review? If you posted a review on TripAdvisor, did you then post a review to all the other sites, as well, for that same place? If you aren’t posting those reviews, then who is?

I don’t have any research to back this up, but I’m guessing that most on-line reviewers fall into one of three categories:

  • People who had a great or terrible experience and want to tell the world about it (infrequent contributors, I bet),
  • People who aspire to be or consider themselves to be expert reviewers (a small number of people who are frequent contributors); and
  • Fake reviewers, trying to boost their own business or destroy a competitor or maybe get something for free from a business (probably more frequent contributors than the first category).

As to the latter, Bing Liu, Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois-Chicago, found in a 2008 research project that up to one-third of on-line reviews are fake. Would you read a news site if you knew that one-third of the stories were fake (excepting The Onion, of course!)?

The sheer number of fake reviews doesn’t inspire confidence. When the results of a search pop up on my screen, I don’t know if the places that show up are there because they have a good marketing department, or if they are just really good. With print guides, of course, some writers or publishers accepted gifts or other incentives for including a listing, but, while endorsing (or trashing) a place for financial reasons is not limited to on-line reviews, it is far easier to do on-line. I know that user-generated reviews can have a big upside (real people, real experiences), but the model only works well if a lot of real people participate regularly, and even then, it may not work well enough.

As an experiment, I used TripAdvisor to look up restaurants for a recent trip to Door County, Wisconsin, eating at places only if it had dozens of reviews on the site. I discovered that a lot of you out there are very generous with the four and five star ratings; my personal ratings were usually a full star less than the average rating in TripAdvisor.

So yeah, travel information on the Internet has made it possible to search tremendous amounts of information at very little (or no) cost, but we’re too easily impressed with technology. (A recent review of Wikivoyage focused almost entirely on the bells and whistles of the new site, with only a passing reference to the value of the actual content.) Just because it’s easier to access a range of information, doesn’t mean that the quality of the information is any good, it just means we can access the crap more quickly. And that ease of access can also disguise the fact that what we’re reading is actually crap.

I know that we are living in an era when being an expert is often derided as elitist, even anti-democratic, and I’ll admit that I don’t get the hostility. When it comes to travel advice, experts have much to offer:

  • They have a lot of experience with the locales they write about.
  • They make recommendations based on multiple visits, not just one.
  • They are experienced travelers who have an internal database (in their heads) of what merits a top rating and what’s merely average.

Besides that, the experts understand that travel is very personal and we all travel in different ways and for different reasons. If you are someone who only stays in all-inclusive resorts, I don’t really care what your opinion is of the one local guesthouse you stayed at one time. And you shouldn’t care what I think of all-inclusive resorts. The thing is, when you search through those on-line reviews, you don’t have any idea about those preferences.

So while I’d like to figure out the best way forward for my livelihood (after all, I, too, write about travel and would like to sell more of my travel content), I am a traveler first. I’m trying to figure out how to get the information I desire without wasting a lot of time sorting through the crap. While I don’t have all the answers just yet, what I won’t be doing is relying exclusively on any Internet-based source. I suppose I’ll try some combination of eBooks and getting ideas from locals and other travelers more often. And maybe just accepting the fact that, in spite of the explosion of on-line content, I’m going to have to work a little harder when I travel independently, and that is probably a not a bad thing.

So I ask you:
Who do you trust to give you reliable and (mostly) unbiased information when you travel?

How much time are you willing to spend trying to verify the reliability of those sources?

How much time are you willing to spend sorting through content on the Internet to help with a trip?

© Dean Klinkenberg, 2013