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Can You Trust Your Guidebook for Hotel Recommendations?

Go To The Hotel's Web Site Where: United Kingdom

January 24, 2007 at 12:07 PM | 3 Comments

Should you choose a hotel based on what you read in that guidebook you're using to plan your trip? The answer is, it depends on who wrote it. With the state of guidebook publishing where it is today, someone who has no idea what they're talking about may have put the book together, with it edited by an office worker who has never set foot in the destination.

That's the depressing theme of this article in the Times of London, Travel Guidebooks Slammed. There's an overall trend in the publishing industry where authors are being paid less to deliver more and as a result, only the fools who don't know any better are taking on the job. "The result is that publishers are using young, inexperienced contributors -- many who are first-time authors -- and that standards of reliability and the quality of writing have fallen dramatically. Another effect is that authors are cutting corners, not bothering to visit places as low fees do not cover expenses."

One author put it more succintly, saying, "They pay * * * *, they get * * * *" How much money are we talking about? In her example, less than $6K to do a 60,000-word book requiring loads of research and 60 photographs. Ouch. So before you make week-long reservations at the hotel that sounds just perfect in your guidebook, you may want to do a quick background check of your own.

Thanks to travel blog WorldHum for catching this one. For more articles on the state of guidebook publishing, see the links below.

Related Stories:
· There's More to a Guidebook Than its Cover [Budget Travel]
· Guidebook Smackdown! [Transitions Abroad]

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Author Photo: Tim L. by Tim L.

3 Comments

Return to » Can You Trust Your Guidebook for Hotel Recommendations?

  1. Michael de Zayas

    HotelChatter Member
    January 24, 2007 at 9:54 PM




    Re: Can You Trust Your Website for Hotel Recommend

    How ironic to see this here.

    Guidebooks pay a lot more to writers than travel websites. If money is to be the factor in quality, well we can all turn off our computers right now.

    Exploitation is the way of life in the ink (and web) businesses. Great writers are always to be found who will do above-and-beyond work for pennies (see my reviews for this site) and you'll find, naturally, writers who do poor work for pennies, as well as poor work for a lot of money (see Esquire).

    I wrote the first edition Close-Up Guide to Spain for Fodor's and took 5 other guidebooks with me - all were trash, but that reflects the people writing them, not the remuneration.

    For the record, I got $3,000 for three months work. It was a $90,000 education.

  1. markj

    HotelChatter
    January 25, 2007 at 10:11 AM




    Trust

    Hotel reviews are arbitrary.

    You could just as easily have a stack of websites in that photo as a stack of guidebooks.

    Trust is all in the source, not in how much they were paid to write the item in question.

    Could go on and on with examples, but that would be boring.

    My unsolicited advice?

    Travel guidebooks, travel web sites, use them all and use your own filter to determine what sources best correlate with your line of thinking.

  1. Tim L.

    HotelChatter Member
    January 26, 2007 at 1:36 PM




    Re: Can You Trust Your Guidebook for Hotel Recomme

    All valid observations. Some beginning guidebook writers do great work for peanuts, while some experienced ones get sloppy later and don't. I think it's safe to say though that less and less time is being put into the hands-on research of a guidebook because it's getting too hard for anyone to justify the time financially--even a starving artist student. If you listen to what the authors themselves are saying, everyone is cutting corners these days and getting the work done as quickly as possible.

    On the web, there's far less permanence and so much more user-generated content that's not compensated, so the bar of expectation is not as high. And true, you have to consider the source and filter out the bad advice. There are some great and thorough reviews on TripAdvisor, for instance, but also a lot of revengeful rants and shill comments that sound like they were planted by an employee. The challenge is figuring out which is which...

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