Although we can get a lot of information online these days, there’s still something reassuring about having a physical guidebook with you when you travel. After all, they don’t need constantly charging and you don’t need a signal in order to read them. They also survive quite well if you drop them in the swimming pool.
In our view, you can’t go wrong with either a Rough Guide or a Lonely Planet guide, whether they’re to the whole country, just Athens, Crete, or the Greek Islands. Their main guides can be a bit hefty to lug around, being about the size of a brick, but they’re very thorough and we’ve used them a lot over the years. Will that be changing, though?
Lonely Planet recently announced, to the dismay of their regular writers, that they’re going to be generating some of their future guidebook content using AI. Will their sales suffer because of this? We wouldn’t be surprised. Why buy a AI-generated guide when you can go to an AI engine like Google’s Gemini yourself and ask it for the five best restaurants in Athens, the opening hours for the Acropolis, or whatever it is that you want to know?
AI might have a vast database of knowledge, but it’s never set foot in Greece! And where will AI get its information from if guidebook publishers (and other media) no longer pay people to go to places and describe their experiences?
Which brings us to the main point of this week’s newsletter. If you’re in the habit of going to Amazon and looking for guidebooks when you’re planning a trip, then beware. While there have always been a few so-called guidebooks on there that people have basically copied from Wikipedia or elsewhere online, in the last year there has been an explosion of what you might call pretend guidebooks, thanks to AI.
People are picking popular destinations and using AI to generate instant (and superficial) guides to them. As a random example, we took a look at guides to Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki.
The first thing you notice is that these pretend guides like to stress how up-to-date they are by plastering 2024 in their titles and on the covers. The second thing we noticed is that one of these 2024 Thessaloniki guides is written by ‘Felix B. Ott’. Hmm, bot: now that is being cheeky! Good old Felix has managed to write 35 guides in 2024, which is pretty good going. But we suspect Felix hasn’t made as much money as he thought he would. Only a handful of his guides have had reviews, and they are unanimously one-star, like: ‘I would recommend avoiding this book. I believe it was written by AI, then printed on demand. Written as vague bullet points without any insights into the city. Find a different guide!’
The Thessaloniki Travel Guide 2024 by a Mary Small also has a single one-star review, though the disgruntled buyer left no comment. Another Thessaloniki author, Davina Quest, has managed to write 37 guidebooks in 2024! Now as the authors of numerous real guidebooks, we can tell you that to produce just one title takes weeks of planning, then weeks of on-the-ground travel, and then several more weeks of writing, then a to-and-fro editing process, which is why your 2024 guidebook was probably researched and written a whole year earlier.
So do your homework before buying a guidebook to Greece, or anywhere else. If someone’s written 37 guidebooks - beware! If the guidebook has no reviews - beware! And if the guidebook is written by a bot or a B. Ott - beware! For some real books about Greece to inform and inspire you, click here.
Till next time
Mike and Donna