I’ve always wondered about Lonely Planet. My suspicions started in Florence, Italy. The writer of the aforementioned volume swore his life by this one little gelato shop near the train station. He recommended the specific flavor of the gelato and espoused it to be ambrosia. I trekked all over Florence just for this gelato and ended up tossing ¾ of it in the trash. It was so bad that no one with normal taste buds could ever deem it good. It was watery and chalky, everything a diet shake should be and a gelato should not. That experience lead me to one conclusion: the writer did not personally try the gelato.

Then it was the highly recommended hostel in Costa Rica, whereby a permanent resident of the hostel followed us and opened up his long, black, trench coat to us while mumbling god-knows-whats, revealing the myriad of illegal drugs he had in his trench coat pockets. That coupled with the manager of the hostel washing his baby’s butt smeared in fecal matter over the common kitchen sink was the last straw.

And then there’s this: http://www.thomaskohnstamm.com/ , an ex-Lonely Planet writer ratting out the less professional practices of the guide book industry, specifically, Lonely Planet. While I am certain that there are those diligent writers out there trekking on for our benefit, I can’t help but wonder, do (some) travel writers go to hell?

Note: The guide books that I relied upon were all the most recent editions released at the time, purchased weeks before the trips.