I recently asked my friend Doug if he still uses guidebooks to plan his trips abroad. He's a smart guy and a veteran traveler, so I figured he would have a thoughtful reason one way or the other. He did not.
"I probably don't use guidebooks because I've essentially forgotten they exist," he said.
I'm guessing Doug is not alone. Sales of international travel guides in the United States are down 42 percent since 2006, according to the Nielsen BookScan Travel Publishing Yearbook. As online resources have expanded, I'll bet lots of people have shifted their travel planning to the web without giving it any thought at all. And I suspect some who still use guidebooks think they're wasting money for what they could find online free.
But are they? I decided to try an experiment: I would buy a brand-new guidebook, comb through it, then to try to replicate or improve upon what I found in the free but chaotic bounty of the World Wide Web. I bought and read most of the Lonely Planet's Hungary guide (which I chose because Lonely Planet is popular among Frugal Traveler readers and I know nothing about Hungary) and then got to work.
My first stop was LonelyPlanet.com, where I was somewhat shocked to find most of the content I had just paid $24.99 for was free online: a section on the country's history, practical information, specifics like airport transport in Budapest, and many more listings for hotels, restaurants and attractions than were in the book. (The site had reviews for 200 restaurants in Budapest while my book had only 48.)
Still, a few things were missing — important things. The dozens of indexed city and town and neighborhood maps were absent. Suggested itineraries were gone. There was no glossary of useful Hungarian phrases. (A spokeswoman for Lonely Planet said some guidebooks had significantly less online.) And, though the site was fine for finding something specific, it was clumsier to browse through and get a feel for the country, especially on a mobile device. The formatting also makes it difficult and time-consuming to copy, paste and print your way to a homemade guidebook.
Still, Lonely Planet's robust web showing does not apply to all guidebook companies — Rough Guides, for example, offers limited content online. So I also tried an à la carte approach.
For lodging, the obvious first stop was TripAdvisor.com, which replaces a guidebook's curated list of tightly written reviews with free-for-all user evaluations, only partly controllable by tools that filter and rank results by price, availability, location, type of reviewer (family, solo, people in your Facebook network) and more. Booking.com and Hotels.com also depend on customer reviews. Is that a valid substitute? To many, it is. Even if you prefer curated picks, there are free sites like TheHotelGuru.com, with reviews writers contribute themselves or cull from guidebooks and articles. (Of course, as with flights, the most up-to-date information on hotel prices is online.)
For sightseeing information, there were endless options, and I only scratched the surface. I checked Hungary's official tourist website, Gotohungary.com, which had good if limited ideas, but was lacking practical information like prices. My next stop was Wikivoyage.org, which is run by the Wikimedia Foundation and is the closest thing I found in format to an online guidebook. It had plenty of ideas for Hungary, although the length and quality of descriptions were erratic, the writing was dull and practical information was again scarce.
I also tried the user-generated reviews on Gogobot.com, which allows you to see rankings by people in "tribes" like yours: budget travelers, "trendsters," "spiritual seekers" and the like. Not bad.
But to me, the site that came closest to replicating a guidebook experience, while still harnessing the power of the Internet, is Stay.com. Sights and activities (and hotels and restaurants) are separated by category, and there are curated guides by the site's editors, users and local experts ("Family Fun in Budapest," for example). Best of all, you can click to add any item to your own "city guide"; the result is a personalized itinerary, complete with customized map, that can be downloaded to your cellphone and used without piling up cellular data.
There are so many ways to find restaurants online, I don't even know where to begin. I already had culled ideas from the sites I've mentioned. Next, local resources: with a simple Google search, I found a few compelling sites in English (chew.hu, Best of Budapest, Everythingbudapest.eu), as well as articles published in newspapers like this one. Chowhound's discussion boards had what sounded like knowledgeable Budapest tips. And I haven't mentioned the power of Facebook, Twitter, Couchsurfing and online travel forums for getting personalized advice.
It may sound like the web was blowing away my guidebook — but not so fast. Literally: It's not so fast. Marking up the guidebook took a few hours and came to an obvious end (the last page). But I could have sifted through these sites forever. For some people, that's fine: it's been shown that planning a trip actually makes us happier than the trip itself. But choice can be paralyzing. For those who want the deciding done for them, a trusted guidebook brand wins, at least in planning an agenda.
The score was more or less tied in some other areas, like overviews on culture and history, collections of some useful phrases and important cultural mores like tipping. Wikivoyage alone covered most of those.
Still, I found three ways that a guidebook stomps the web almost every time:
First, those curated maps. No site I tried — Google, Michelin, Bing — could match the book's maps, even after being customized to pinpoint hotels and restaurants and sights. If you do want to print out city or town maps and mark them up yourself, I found Bing Maps to be by far the cleanest-looking and easiest to print. (Use the full-screen feature, take a screen shot and print.)
Second, guidebooks offer information you may never think to look for online. In the Hungary book, I happened on a section about common tourist scams in Budapest, and an article on Budapest's Jewish population — neither of which I would have thought to look up on my own.
Finally, there's simple convenience. A guidebook means an extra pound or so in your bag. But it's all in one place, doesn't run out of batteries or go out of range or use international data and is unlikely to be ripped out of your hand by a thief. And for infrequent travelers, it doesn't have a steep learning curve.
If the web is a fully stocked kitchen where an experienced chef given enough time can produce a brilliant meal, guidebooks are an energy bar, packing all the nutrients you need into a handy package that can be tossed into your bag. Of course, there's one catch: at $25, that's one expensive energy bar.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 26, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the name and web address of an online guide for lodging. It is TheHotelGuru.com, not HotelGuru.com
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