Travel Guidebooks Should Better Utilize Their Users

We've used travel guidebooks to help plan our vacations abroad -- Tanzania just a few weeks ago, and Crete last year.  On both trips, there were multiple times when the information in the guidebook was inaccurate.  This was especially the case on subjective things like hotel & restaurant reviews.  The Lonely Planet was particularly bad:  It recommended a restaurant, the Leopard Hotel, in Moshi saying it had the cleanest, open kitchen in the city.  It also happened to have been the worst dining experience for us and, independently, other travelers we met in town.  Of course, hotels & restaurants are information categories that are dynamic -- new ones come up, existing ones get worse or better, etc.  Since guidebooks are hardly updated every year, let alone more frequently, they tend to have outdated information -- the Lonely Planet East Africa edition is copyright 2003, so the information is at least 2 years old and probably older, not to mention that the reviews are highly subjective, often based on a sample size of 1 (the reviewer's experience). 

The guidebooks should tap their users to better their product and offer user generated Web content as a companion to their guides.  Some of them already have bulletin boards, but they're not the same thing.  I'm thinking Amazon-style reviews that aggregates the wisdom of the crowd to provide a more accurate picture.  What would really be useful though would be to have a wiki where users could update inaccurate information given about a place (and subject to editorial review).  There already exists a travel wikipedia, but it's kind of sparsely populated, and tries to recreate the static info that the guidebooks already do a good job (like When to Go, Climate, History), instead of dynamic info like restaurant & hotel recommendations (which I understand is not as germane for an 'encyclopedia', but we're talking about an online guidebook anyhow). 

The closest that comes to this is TripAdvisor, but their site lacks basic information about a place, is hard to navigate with all of their ads, and users can only submit reviews rather than correct inaccurate information.   Trip Advisor and someone like a Rough Guide or Lonely Planet should get together and integrate. 

Comments

[Donovan]

Don't forget BootsnAll.com. Loads of good content to subsidize your books.