I love guidebooks. I have about 10 plastic storage boxes of them nicely packed up and stashed under the bed. Each box is carefully marked with the appropriate continent and includes a list of titles crammed inside. Europe occupies several containers, and so does Asia. And India has a special Rubber-Maid storage unit of its own.
I’m not partial to any specific publisher, though I do admit that once upon a time I was a devout Lonely Planet groupie. Because old habits die hard, I still read their guides. Their books have pretty pictures (but not as pretty as the Insight Guides series) and their historical info is accurate (but not as extensive as in the Bradt guides), and occasionally, they do come up with a nice restaurant recommendation. All you need to do then is to locate the LP recommended place, and promptly head next door, leaving throngs of guidebook-clutching tourists behind. When in Europe, use similar technique for Rick Steves’ favorite places. It never fails.
Last week I had a chat with a guy over at Lonely Planet. They’re soon sending writers to Kenya to put together a new guidebook and what the bloke wanted was local “honest and trustworthy” contacts for their team on the ground. Well, dears, if your writers are unable to procure such info themselves, then maybe they should take up basket weaving instead of guidebook writing, don’t you think? Though I suppose this is an enormous improvement – at least now LP is making sure their contributors actually visit the destination they’re supposed to write about.
Yet the saddest part of this story is that whatever book they will eventually produce will be outdated by the time it hits the shelves, or the Amazon.com warehouse. That’s the unfortunate fate of printed travel guides. Their half-lives have become so short that anyone who’s still using books to plan a trip might be in for a rude surprise. Not many businesses can withstand the test of time and the endless publicity that comes with being mentioned in a guidebook. Recommended restaurants morph into over-priced tourist traps, and that cheap, clean hotel right on the beach becomes a magnet for women looking to supplement their income. For every Fairlawn Hotel and Katz’s Deli, there are thousands of places that force us to scratch our heads and think “how on earth did THIS make it into a guidebook?”
Yes, how indeed? Depending on a publisher’s policy, and frequently – regardless of a publisher’s policy, it might have been as easy as offering a pint “on the house” to a cash-strapped travel writer on assignment. It also comes as a surprise to many that guidebook authors don’t actually stay in all the hotels they recommend, nor do they eat in all the restaurants they include in their volumes.
So what’s a traveler to do? Some, like me, get the book anyway, if only for its sentimental value – 1998 in Colombia, yeah, those were the good ole days – read it and then promptly pack it away. Some actually follow the suggestions inside and then kvetch that the book was out of date. And some ignore the guidebook altogether and turn to the net instead.
As a total Luddite, I took more time than usual to warm up to the idea of the internet as a travel planning tool. Sure, I used it for booking flights and hotels, and even for reading the New York Times travel section. But to forsake the guidebook completely and put my trust into the faceless automatons on the web instead? Unthinkable!
The conversion happened gradually over the period of about seven minutes. I was stranded in Buenos Aires, my luggage with my guidebook in it flying somewhere around the world. I needed a hotel recommendation. And quick. After trudging to the nearest internet café and posting my sad predicament on a travel forum, within minutes I was directed to an estancia owned by somebody’s best friend’s cousin’s mother-in-law. Cheap, clean and English-speaking. On a different forum fellow travelers recommended places to eat, things to do, and vistas to admire. Local travel bloggers, both natives and expats alike, offered their tour-guide services and inside knowledge. And when my luggage finally arrived, I took the guidebook out meaning to read it, and then promptly forgot about it.
Since that time, I have met scores of travelers who have abandoned the guidebook in favor of the web. They go to Trip Advisor, which boast more than 15 million user generated reviews of hotels, vacations, restaurants and everything in between. They ask questions on travel message boards at Fodor’s, Thorn Tree, Bootsnall, or Slow Travel and get replies almost instantly. They read the numerous destination guides like Europe for Visitors or Pacific Coast Highway Travel. They download podcasts for guided tours. And use websites to plan everything from cruises to day trips to campervan vacations. Many of the on-line travel planning tools are put together and managed by former paper guidebook authors who abandoned analog in favor of digital publishing.
The traditional guidebook companies took notice. Some started to offer their books as per-chapter downloads. Unfortunately, those chapters, even when downloaded, contain the same obsolete info as their hard-copy printed versions. The concept of a continuously updated e-travel guide hasn’t caught on with the big guys. Yet.
In the meantime, when planning my new adventure, all I need from a bookstore is a map. Everything else is downloaded onto my PDA and iPod, and I’m all set to go. Guidebooks are for reading, the web is for traveling. Now, if you excuse me, I have more research to do for my upcoming trip. And where did I bookmark that site about shopping in Seoul…
See more of Anna Etmanska's travel writing on her blog, www.budgettrouble.com.