Honesty, accuracy and corrections

Honesty and accuracy are things we feel quite strongly about: more strongly, it seems, than some others who write travel books, articles or web-sites. More than once, we have approached major publishers of popular series of guide-books with a view to contributing. Each time, we have found the amount they pay to be derisory: too little to pay for any meaningful research into the kind of information they say they want.

We make these observations about travel publishers' pay scales because we are absolutely confident from personal experience that many of the detailed hotel and restaurant recommendations that they make are based at best on a cursory glance. At worst, they are flat lies: it is simply impossible to check fully the number of places they list, at least with any degree of accuracy. We know: we've tried, before realizing that there was no point. A country-wide guide-book that lists (say) an average of 5 hotels in each of 200 cities and towns implies 1000 nights' stay, or 3 years' research. And how many meals can you eat in a day?

Just before we launched the site, there was a scandal involving a well-known budget guide. We won't say which one, for fear of a lawsuit, but it wasn't Guide du Routard, which we have so far found reliable. One of their authors told how he had accepted favours from hotels in return for coverage (forbidden by the terms of his contract), and how he had not even visited one of the countries he was covering.

We don't do this. If we say we have first-hand knowledge, we have. If we haven't (as of Albania, for example), there will be plenty of clues in the country-by-country sections, with such words and phrases as 'apparently', 'are said to be' and 'reports indicate that'.

Kitchen, Mision la Purisima, Lompoc, California

Many of the places we recommend on this site are not the conventional tourist 'honeypots'. This is mostly because honeypots are too crowded and too expensive: and besides, it's just more fun to have a place pretty much to yourself.

Of course, it would be foolish and unfair to say that all travel books are unreliable or dishonest. Many are excellent, evm established series: for example, the A&C Black Blue Guide series are superb. So are many books that are not part of a series. But most books that pretend to give a great deal of 'on the ground' practical information about hotels and restaurants must, at the very least, have taken some of their information on trust, and based other parts on the most cursory inspections -- unless the information is made up from the whole cloth.

We make no claim for perfection. Some of the information here will inevitably be out of date: we cannot go everywhere, all the time, and constantly update things. We also make mistakes: misremembering, mistyping, being convinced by a wrong reference. Anyone who pretends they are always right should be regarded with the deepest suspicion.

If you spot a flat error, therefore, please contact us and we will do our best to correct it as soon as possible. We will, however 'take a view' (as accountants say) on disputed information and matters of opinion. Ultimately, it's our site, with our biases, and we reckon it's better for our readers to know what our biases are than to try to guess where we're trying to accommodate other points of view.

As we say elsewhere, we set up this site because it's the sort of information we wish we had been able to find when we started on semi-adventurous travel: information that isn't readily or reliably available elsewhere. That's why we hope you'll find it useful. Maybe even useful enough to help support the site.

Monument Park, Hungary

A few miles outside Budapest is the 'Monument Park', a repository of Soviet-era statues, monuments and memorials. Some are fascinating; some are moving; some are doctrinaire rubbish. But a part of semi-adventurous travel is trying to track down things like this: things to which you have seen a passing reference; which are unlikely to be on any conventional tour; and which look to be worth visiting. Keep a notebook of such things. Then, if you feel like it, plan a trip around them. We have often done the same thing with spas.

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