Societal Evolution (page 5 of 5)

on mobile we have all the necessary information and we no longer need to lug around a heavy, bulky book.

True, but what makes travel guides special is their curation of the best addresses. Not all the addresses you find online are necessarily worth it. It’s like Gallimard editions, for example—they receive thousands of manuscripts and have to make a selection. Or the Michelin Guide. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, on TripAdvisor in particular, there can be fake positive reviews.

Especially on Tripadvisor, there can be fake positive reviews

As I mentioned earlier (post 77), travel guides recommend places they’ve NEVER actually visited, so it’s no surprise that people later come to forums to say that a place recommended by a guide was terrible.

For reviews on Tripadvisor and Google, I read several and only pay attention to those posted by people who’ve shared MULTIPLE reviews. I never trust reviews from someone who’s only posted once, whether it’s positive or negative.

By following this "method" and looking at the many photos, you can get a pretty accurate idea of a place—I’ve verified this afterward several times. I think it’s much more reliable than a travel guide or a review from just one or two people on a travel forum.

Nowadays, the hotel, restaurant, and café pages in paper guides are completely useless. And as I mentioned earlier, places listed in guides take advantage of their reputation to charge higher prices than other equally good—or even better—establishments.

As I’ve said before, the only advantage of travel guides is that everything is in one place, so you don’t drown in a flood of sometimes contradictory information.

you don’t drown under a mass of information that’s sometimes contradictory.

And false, and purely commercial...

Tripadvisor and the like are over.

Reviews don’t mean anything anymore. A McDonald’s can almost have a 4.8...

And a good restaurant gets a 4 just because the prices aren’t slashed...

I also find there are fewer and fewer recent reviews, and like in a kids’ talent show, the ratings are ridiculously inflated.

A 7 should be a decent score. Now it’s become a terrible one. A 9 means not bad at all, when it should be pretty exceptional.

Everything ends up blending together.

Hello,

I think AI is going to play a bigger and bigger role in trip planning.

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Not just in planning, but also on the ground: A few months ago, we were dining with a group in a restaurant in a small town in Brazil. We wanted to order wine, but the wine list only had bottles from South America. One of the guests said, "Wait, let’s ask AI for its opinion on this wine list." So we did, and we ordered the one with the best rating. Well, it wasn’t very good… *sigh* Can’t even trust machines anymore…

One of the guests: "Wait, let's ask the AI for its opinion on this wine list"

And why didn’t you just ask the server? 🤔

I think to get a satisfying answer, you need to be pretty specific in your questions—maybe by specifying your wine preferences, you’d have gotten a more tailored response.

But your example (and there are others like it in the forums) shows that today, almost everyone—not just 20-year-olds—uses AI for everything, and in a few years, it’ll be the norm, and no one will bat an eye.

And if people are gradually getting used to asking AI, it’s because, overall, they’re satisfied with it—otherwise, they wouldn’t keep doing it.

I agree with you—once you're there, a good old-fashioned paper map, a Michelin map, and a bit of intuition. The old-school way! 😛 And for prep: blogs or forums with recent info.

On the spot, a good old GDR And for prep: blogs or forums with recent info

Often, the GDR is really lacking compared to its competitors. It dedicates a lot of pages (useless, in my opinion) to hotels, restaurants, cafés, or souvenir shops and completely skips entire regions of some countries.

For example, for Guatemala, the GDR doesn’t mention Nebaj or the Ixil Triangle, while Lonely Planet and Petit Futé do. It’s a shame because it’s a stunning region (and super interesting for anyone into the country’s history), and travel blogs barely cover it (it’s an isolated mountainous area).

Lonely Planet has changed its format and cut down the space devoted to hotels and restaurants. For instance, in their Tunisia guide, they dedicate just one page to hotels in six cities, whereas the GDR gives at least one page per city.

Lonely Planet realized that with the internet, those pages are becoming less useful—especially since so many travelers now stay in Airbnbs.

These days, anyone can find a hotel in a few clicks. You don’t need a travel guide’s recommendations. I spent a week in Joyabaj (Guatemala), a city that doesn’t appear in any guide or blog, and I had no trouble finding a hotel on my own.

Beyond travel guides and blogs, visiting tourist offices (when they exist) can be helpful. It was on the advice of the Chichicastenango tourist office that I went to Joyabaj—a city I’d never heard of—and it ended up being the most memorable week of my two-month trip.

As for travel forums, no matter which one, I haven’t found much of interest since the pandemic. For my last big trips (Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama), the most useful info came from pre-COVID discussions. Latin American forums were super active before the pandemic, but now they’re either dead or overrun with ads for guides or agencies.

For my most recent trip, Tunisia, it’s the same—there’s hardly any recent info on forums (on VoyageForum, the last travel journal was from 2019).

I really enjoy browsing on Google Maps or Maps.me. The backroads, the viewpoints, the photos—usually still without added effects for landscapes—and the spots where there just aren’t any yet, or so few! 😛

Guidebooks for the history, geography, etc. of the country, but also the main tourist highlights for a first look at the destination!

And travel journals. 🙂

Of course AI will take over, even for asking for wine list recommendations. Because the problem is that the vast majority of people working in restaurants, or even travel agencies, don’t know anything about what they’re selling. They’re only there to push a product, but when you need precise, in-depth explanations... there’s no one around.

Of course AI will take over, even for asking for wine list recommendations. Because the problem is that the vast majority of people who work in restaurants, or even travel agencies, know absolutely nothing about their subject.

AI will take over because it's the easy solution—this had already started with smartphones.

Nowadays, who asks a human for directions? If people are lost, they just look at their phone—it's so easy.

It's a shame because asking a person for directions can be nice.

I still don’t have a smartphone—I just have a basic Nokia with buttons that I never take on trips. I travel with a tablet that I leave at the hotel, so when I’m lost, I *have* to ask someone for directions, and it often leads to a conversation. The same goes for getting information about a place.

For example, in Italy, I’ve asked several times what certain buildings were that I didn’t recognize, and the people I spoke to launched into long explanations. I could’ve gotten that info from AI, but I find it nicer to ask people—and it helped me practice my Italian.

Other recent examples: I asked a man for directions in the medina of Sfax, and he took me to visit the four floors of his shoe-making workshop. In the dyers' souk in the medina of Tunis, someone showed me the machines dyeing fabrics. In Tunisia, I was often surprised when I asked someone for directions while they were eating cookies, fruit, or a snack, and they offered me some—a "custom" that doesn’t exist in Europe. And I have plenty of similar examples in other countries besides Italy and Tunisia.

If I’d had a smartphone, I would’ve missed out on these interactions with locals.

I’ve tried to resist buying a smartphone so I don’t spend my life glued to it, but I’ll probably get one soon because I’m going to South Korea for nearly two months, and I think it’ll make life easier for translations and getting around. But I’m really tempted to go like I usually do—without a smartphone, without apps, just with a tablet that stays at the hotel (not so long ago, tourists managed just fine without these tools)... and keep asking humans for directions (and information).

If I had had a smartphone, I would have missed out on those interactions with the locals.

Not necessarily—one doesn’t rule out the other.

For me, a smartphone is essential, or nearly so. 😉 Some apps are really useful when we travel. I couldn’t do without Organic Maps or my translation app anymore. I also use a hiking app, a weather app, a level app when we travel with our camper, and an app for the northern lights, etc. But that doesn’t stop me from chatting with people or asking for directions.