Be Advised

Hello again. Been almost 2 months since my last post due busy days in Italy, Oktoberfest in Munich, and internet censorship in China. I promise to post some pictures when I again have some reliable internet, as the signal here in the chaotic city of Kathmandu, Nepal is often infuriatingly inconsistent. In the meantime, here is a post about how best to use guidebooks and travel sites when planning your next getaway.

Guide books like Rick Steves, Frommers, and Lonely Planet as well as sites like Trip Advisor can be good resources when planning a trip. Unless you have read about something or seen a documentary on a destination, odds are, when planning a vacation, you don’t have a clear and concise vision of where you want to travel, what to do once you get there, and how best to use modes of transportation to most efficiently navigate your way around your intended destination. I’m not going to spend this post telling you which guidebook is better. All have their merits. Rick Steves is by far and away the best to use when planning Europe, and some combination of every other guidebook will help you plan your itineraries for destinations everywhere else in the world. In general, it is of great benefit to utilize as many paper, video, and human resources as possible when planning a trip in order to gather as many different opinions on how to structure an itinerary which suits your likes.

Seven years ago, when I planned my first 2 month trip through Europe, I more or less followed Rick Steves’s itineraries to a tee. Having never traveled alone, there was a certain comfort which came from having someone else plan my way for me. I stayed in each city as long as he saw necessary. I went to nearly every museum, did every city walking tour, stayed at his recommended budget lodging options, and ate at his recommended restaurants. What I learned from this style of travel is that unless you have a true love for a particular artist, art style, and/or history of the region, museums will just be a waste of time and money. If that’s your scene, the world is your oyster. If you enjoy hiking, spend as little time in cities as possible and see the beauty the world has to offer. If you love food, try to do cooking classes, sample street food, and eat where you see tons of locals and very few tourists. Nearly every destination you could ever want to visit anywhere in the world affords you the opportunity to do a little bit of all of those things, but travel to your strengths and don’t let other people tell you how and where to travel.

Which brings me to Trip Advisor, the site which shapes world travel based upon the opinions of the masses in regards to worldly destinations, attractions, restaurants, and places of lodging. When I first started using this site as a tool to go to a well-reviewed restaurant or perhaps narrow my focus on possible attractions to visit at a particular destination, I found it extremely useful. After all, why shouldn’t I go to a restaurant which has received a Certificate of Excellence for the year 2014? The food has to be great if hundreds of people say so and very few people offer up a contradictory view point, doesn’t it? A destination like the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xian, China can’t let me down if thousands of tourists love it, or can it? After having enough experiences which were contradictory to the masses, I reassessed how I use Trip Advisor and found some fatal flaws which I’ll lay out for you in the hopes you get the most benefit out of the site.

1. It’s human nature to pre-determine how much enjoyment you’ll get out of an experience based upon other’s first hand experiences. If you're on Trip Advisor and see that thousands of people love the Terra Cotta Warriors vs. the hundreds who don't, you’ve probably already had your mind made up for you that you’ll also love it, even if you hate crowds and have an aversion to fancy pottery. You’ll see the thousands of warriors, marvel at the feat of constructing such a display so many thousands of years ago, and forgive/ignore everything you hate about the place just to ultimately force yourself to have the same opinion shared by the masses on Trip Advisor. So, like most everyone else who has a written a review about the Terra Cotta Warriors, and rated it 5 stars, you too write a 5 star review that goes something like this, "Absolutely amazing. Yeah it was hot and there were tons of people constantly pushing me, which made taking pictures difficult, but it's China so there are going to be unruly crowds. Our tour bus then took us to the farmer who discovered the warriors, and even though we met some other people who said their tour bus went to a different farmer who also supposedly discovered the warriors, and in spite of the sales push our farmer was giving us to buy the book he wrote about his discovery, it was still an amazing day I'll never forget and a once in a lifetime experience." Half of that type of review is negative, yet it still was rated 5 stars. After all, for most people, if they’ve spent a ton of time and money planning a trip to China, they won’t really want to admit to themselves that the Terra Cotta Warriors was a waste of said time and money. We all want to feel good about the choices we make in life especially when it comes to how we spend our time and money, so we'll often look at our experiences through rose colored glasses instead of keeping our eye on reality. The flip side to this conversation is also true. If everyone on Trip Advisor speaks poorly about something you were kind of looking forward to doing, it's quite possible you'll change your mind and scrap that activity from your itinerary based upon the reviews of others, again to avoid potentially wasting time and money. What you really need to consider when reading these reviews is.....

2. .....Who in the world are these people writing reviews and why should I trust them, Part 1? The majority of the reviews are titled, “Greatest thing I’ve ever seen or eaten!” “A Must-See!” “You won’t be disappointed!” These are the reviews from literary giants all over the world which are determining how excellent something is and whether people spend their hard-earned money seeing/eating it!? People take these reviews as gospel, without doing any research of their own, fall into the trap mentioned in point #1, and before long, an opinion snowball is forming and shaping how the world travels. Especially when it comes to restaurants, I need reviews which tell me what was great. Is the whole menu delicious or is it only the $100 steak which is delicious when a particular cook is working that day? There aren’t nearly enough substance laden reviews to merit the Certificates of Excellence Trip Advisor hands out each year based upon the empty one-liners noted above.

3. Who in the world are these people writing reviews and why should I trust them, Part 2? “This is the best gelato I’ve ever eaten!” Really, Billy Bob the corn farmer from Nebraska? The gelato you had at this one place in Venice during the only trip you’ve ever taken outside the Cornhusker state, is the best gelato you’ve ever eaten? You don’t say? Of course it’s the best gelato you’ve ever eaten because it’s probably the only gelato you’ve ever eaten unless Nebraska has somehow become world renowned for its’ creamy corn gelato since I left home 5 months ago. Trusting the taste buds of others is a dangerous dance, especially if you're a foodie like me. If you have less discerning taste buds, then by all means, blindly use Trip Advisor and throw caution to the wind. Otherwise, take Trip Advisor’s food opinions with a grain of salt (pun intended), and go somewhere where you see locals eating. They usually know the best places to eat in town.

4. Who in the world are these people writing reviews and why should I trust them, Part 3? More often than not, it’s very difficult to gauge how much of a world traveler someone is based upon the majority of the empty reviews on this site. Have they ever left a 20 minute radius from their own home or have they been around the world a time or two? The site will tell you how many reviews someone has written and the ‘helpful votes’ they’ve received from other readers, but I’ve only written 25 or so reviews and I’ve done activities in parts of 66 countries. So, if someone has written more reviews than me, again back to point #1 and the mass mentality, readers might value the opinion of a more frequent reviewer, but less seasoned traveler than me simply because they’ve written more reviews. Trying to weed through all of the rubbish reviews can be a maddening process, but if you can find a level-headed review written by someone who seems like they’ve done a bit of traveling, let their opinions at least get the ball rolling on whether that particular activity/restaurant is something which interests you.

5. Size matters. I’ve found that I have less trust for reviews of more popular destinations than I do for reviews written about less frequented destinations. I think Trip Advisor is best suited for small to medium sized towns/cities or moderately frequented tourist destinations. Part of that speaks to the herd mentality. The larger the city and more popular the destination, the greater the chance overall opinions, one way or the other, will become superficially bloated. The bigger point here though is as follows. If you’re in a city like Rome, Venice, New York City, Chicago, etc. where there are hundreds and hundreds of restaurants and you have hundreds of thousands of tourists reviewing them, there are just too many restaurants and opinions to get a clear picture of what is actually the best. Everybody eats everywhere and everybody is likely to have an average meal at worst. So you end up with a muddled mess of hundreds of restaurants being similarly reviewed and just settle on a place close to your hotel because if they’re all average-ish, why walk any further than you have to? Take Venice for instance. The highest rated restaurant in that city, according to Trip Advisor, is a pasta place in a tiny back alley which sells tasty homemade fresh pasta in paper to-go containers for $5. We’re talking about Venice, and the highest rated restaurant only sells $5 pasta to go? That’s simply not true. Not now. Not ever. There have to be other places in town which sell better pasta and there are definitely places where you can sit down to eat and choose from a more comprehensive menu. This place gets rated #1 because it’s a cheap and tasty option for budget eats seekers in a very expensive city and not because it actually has the best pasta in town. Plus, you can’t really know if the pasta is actually good or if the masses have convinced themselves it’s good because it’s way better than terrible and it fits their budget. For the medium sized town though, Trip Advisor can be very valuable. Brasov, Romania is a good example. It has a substantial enough tourist industry which visits its' old town and comparatively few sights and restaurants from which those tourists can visit/eat. As a result, you're more likely to get accurate opinions about those sites/restaurants because everyone has no choice but to visit/eat at the same places. 

So what’s the take-away from all of this?

1. Don’t let mass opinion one way or the other determine how much you really want to do a particular activity. If you want to do something, just do it.

2. Have a discerning eye and look for level headed, well thought out reviews, when using Trip Advisor to help formulate an accurate representation of public opinion.

3. Last but not least, know who you are. Use guidebooks and sites like Trip Advisor as guides to help get you to places suited to your likes, but don’t be closed off to new experiences either. Don’t spend an entire vacation in a big city visiting world-class museums just because they’re world-class museums if you’re someone who hates big cities and prefers spending time interacting with nature. Travel should and can be whatever you want it to be. So get out there, make it your own, and make it memorable.