T A B L E_T A L K The joys of barbecue! Discuss your best memories from around the grill in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Salon Exclusive: Everest debate, Round Two By Weston DeWalt The co-author of "The Climb" counters Jon Krakauer's claims and questions the role of media in high-risk, extreme sports (08/14/98) Salon Exclusive By Jon Krakauer Everest controversy continues: Jon Krakauer rebuts Weston DeWalt's response (08/07/98) Salon Exclusive By Weston DeWalt Everest controversy continues: Weston DeWalt responds to Jon Krakauer (08/07/98) Over Africa By Maryalicia Post An open-cockpit ride in a reproduction 1935 plane (08/06/98) Insider's guide to Paris By David Downie Paris insider: The hottest places to eat, stay and play (08/05/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		THE TRUTH ABOUT GUIDEBOOKS | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - The few sentences describing a place are often fragments jotted down hastily on the spot and then later pieced together. Robert Holmes, who has written for Insider's, Thomas Cook, Frommer's and Fodor's guides, says he allots about 10 minutes to do a museum. He walks quickly through a place to get an idea of it, gets the admission info and the historical focus and then checks it off his list. When I was researching my Greece guide, I would walk in, ask the first guard I found what the museum was known for, look at a few statues, scribble down what the placards said and leave. The eye can become trained to recognize the ills of a place pretty quickly, but how well can you really judge a place with only a fleeting look? It's hard to ascertain what a pension's noise level is like at 3 a.m. without first losing a night's sleep there, or if a bistro uses old meat for its entrees until you eat there, or if there's a dangerous undertow at the secluded beach you've found without going in for a swim. "People don't realize how superficial guidebooks have to be done to be produced in the time and budget that's allocated," says Holmes. They also might not understand the publication process involved. When the year "1998" is emblazoned across the cover of a guidebook, buyers often think that they're getting information gathered in 1998. They should think again. Most of the time, the information has been researched and written at least one year before -- in some cases, the bulk of the information dates back several years -- and has just been updated by phone. Producing the first edition of a guidebook, especially if it is well researched, can take years: All the information has to be collected, then the book has to go through the writing cycle, the editing cycle, the production cycle and the distribution cycle. Even in the guides with the fastest turnarounds, the information is about six months old before it gets onto the bookstore's shelves and into your hands. Editors of the bestselling books readily admit that some places have probably gone out of business, changed owners or even gone from hotel to brothel by the time guidebook-toting travelers show up on the doorstep. "Mistakes get made in every guidebook," acknowledges Anna Portnoy, publishing director of Let's Go, the budget guide series written and edited by Harvard students. "Prices are wrong, directions are wrong. We obviously do our best -- as any guidebook does -- to get accurate information, but things slip through the cracks." Let's Go is just one of about a dozen brand-name series -- such as Frommer's, Fielding's, Baedeker, Michelin, Rough Guide, etc. -- lining the walls of bookstores nowadays. With such intense competition for every book sold, publishers are in a race to get their books out as quickly as possible for the lowest dollar amount. As a result, they're often not realistic about how much time it will take the writer to gather the information, says Tom Brosnahan, author of guides published by Frommer's, Berlitz, Lonely Planet and Insight, and an advisor to the Society of American Travel Writers' Guidebook Institute. This downward trend began in the 1980s, Brosnahan says. "Travel took off, air fares came down to real terms, people got richer and so they traveled more and the travel book business just exploded. Pretty soon, every publisher and his neighbor were trying to get into this market. They said, 'Quick, find us some schmucks with Underwoods to write these things up and get them out there.'" People were given deadlines they couldn't meet and amounts of money they couldn't even live off. It's precisely these financial and time restraints that have led one guidebook writer to the dark side of the guide. "When I get tired, I sometimes say, 'Oh, fuck it,' and pass something by and make do on secondary sources -- fatigue gets to you, laziness sets in," he says. "If you're not being paid well for a project, you can't really expect somebody to go out and break their back." In the worst-case scenario, some writers have been known to travel all the way to their destination and then not even leave their hotel room; they write their book or chapter from within the room, with other guidebooks as their main resource. "We all read other guidebooks and gain inspiration and information from them, but some writers go too far and depend on other guidebooks for most of their info," acknowledges Cummings, who feels that this is one of the biggest problems facing the industry. "Even though it's a perfectly legal thing to do as long as the prose itself isn't plagiarized, this cheats readers, who are expecting a unique perspective on their chosen destination." Updates have their own problems. Even guidebook writers with the best intentions can't afford to revisit a place if they're getting paid only $1,500 or $2,000 to update a book. Airfare and ground transportation would suck up most of that. That's why if a guidebook says "updated" on its cover, it doesn't mean that the writer has actually traveled to the location and found all the newest places to go for that year. It could simply mean that he or she has traveled as far as the refrigerator, while calling the phone numbers from the previous year's guide to make sure that they were still accurate. Consider the plight of Chris Baker, who has been writing guidebooks for the last 15 years for Moon, Lonely Planet and Frommer's, among others. When he was given $2,000 to update another publisher's book on Jamaica, he couldn't afford to return to the country. The whole thing was done from the comfort of his home in Oakland, Calif. "I actually went back to Jamaica a few weeks ago for another reason," Baker says, "and found out that it was absolutely impossible to discover very important changes from home base that I had discovered on the road. So while these are little niggly problems, they do factor into whether a guidebook is accurate or not." Holmes faced a similar problem after being paid the same sum to update a California guide. He says the amount wouldn't have covered the cost just to check everything out firsthand -- let alone pay for his time. (And he lives in California.) So he made some phone calls, took information from press releases and relied heavily on his recollection of the places. Right before the publication went to press, his editors found the mention of a ride at Disneyland that had been closed down for about three years. The quality of a guidebook is also compromised by another one of the biggest problems in the guidebook industry -- the widespread acceptance of complimentary rooms and meals. When writers can't afford to pay for everything they review, hoteliers and restaurateurs often "comp" them -- giving them rooms and meals for free. Brosnahan says he sees no problem with taking a $300 room for free; otherwise, he couldn't afford to stay there and wouldn't be able to assess the place as thoroughly. He says it doesn't affect his objectivity -- if there's noisy plumbing or other problems, he mentions it. But not everyone is so sure. "There are journalists who say that [hosting] doesn't affect their judgment, but it does, it colors your frame of mind," says Holmes. "It automatically puts you in a good mood if you're in a good accommodation and you're not paying for it." Holmes recounts a time when he was in Hawaii on other business and staying in a hotel with his family. While he was there, he was also updating a guide to Hawaii, but since he was just a paying guest -- no one special as far as the hotel was concerned -- he was stuck in a room above a loading dock with trucks backing in and out starting at 6 in the morning. When he complained to the management and told them who he was, they apologized and said that if they had known who he worked for, things would have been different -- he would have been given a quiet oceanfront room. Looking back, I sometimes wonder about all the mistakes I might have made in my book, how it affected the people who bought the guide, planned their vacations around the places I recommended, took everything I wrote to heart. I dread the day when someone I meet tells me about an ill-fated trip and then points a finger in my direction. But I guess that same person could just as likely thank me for some of the places I stumbled into and then jotted down. And this is true for most travel guides. Guidebooks do offer gems in the form of thoughtful recommendations and necessary information to navigate a city or region for the first time. They are useful tools and can be a person's best companion in a foreign location. But readers need an attitude adjustment: Take guides for what they are, and know that not every piece of information they present is definitive. Travel guides are just slices of a world -- sometimes ripe, and sometimes gone rotten. This doesn't mean you should throw your guidebooks away; but don't limit your world by what a harried travel writer has scribbled. Sometimes it pays to venture into the margins. SALON | Aug. 7, 1998 What's your opinion about guidebooks? Do you have any horror stories -- or happy tales -- to tell? Share your experiences in Table Talk.