The Truth About Hotel Recommendations by Lonely Planet & Co.
The Lonely Planet, Bradt, Rough Guide and other guide books usually have this structure: they describe an interesting place for you to visit and then offer a short list of hotels in various price categories. Printed books cost money to produce and cannot be made too thick or too heavy, which leads to these disadvantages:
- The hotel listings in any guide book are very short and leave out many newer or interesting hotels.
- Most tourists follow the recommendations of their guide book and go to the suggested hotels. As a result those few hotels are constantly full, which usually causes them to increase prices and lower their quality or cleanness standards dramatically.
Also the guide books’ recommendations for souvenir shops, spice shops, massage parlors, day-tour guides, etc. suffer from the same problem. And in addition to the printed books, the Lonely Planet Kindle editions also have the same limitations.
Thus we explicitly recommend that you do not go to the hotels suggested by your guide book. At least try to find another hotel first.
Example
Which hotel would you like to stay in? Both cost roughly the same.
Hotel 1 (recommended by the Bradt guide and by Lonely Planet):
Hotel 2 (not recommended by either book):
Our Recommendation
So how do we then recommend that you go about finding a neat, clean and inexpensive hotel? We’ll tell you in our next post. If you don’t want to miss it, subscribe to our RSS feed or .
