Seasoned traveller Rosie Bell explains why mindlessly following online reviews suppresses our natural human need to explore – and why we shouldn’t allow it to be stamped out.
It was a masterclass in how not to run a hotel. To celebrate my birthday, I booked a trip to the Greek island of Rhodes. Things quickly turned sour when I checked in to find a ground-floor hotel room with a broken lock, rude staff, drinks served only in battered plastic cups, ice rationed to two cubes per person despite the scorching summer heat and in-room phones that were inexplicably disconnected at night, in a complete disregard for guest safety.
The fridge heated things rather than cooled. The swimming pool floor felt slimy underfoot. Yet, a browse of the hotel’s online reviews showed countless people proclaiming it as the best stay of their lives. It was then I knew to take online reviews with a pinch of salt.
In the years since, I’ve built a career as a travel journalist, penning professional reviews for magazines and publishers. Knowing what goes into such deeply researched travel guidebooks and edited articles, I trust them to point me towards gratifying experiences.
But user-generated online reviews are different – largely unvetted, often fake and invariably polarised rather than measured and honest. So, why do we place so much importance in them?
Crowdsourcing certainty
In the digital age, we have moved from using online reviews as guidance to treating them as gospel. We will not order lunch unless 1438 anonymous internet people have assured us that we’ll like it. Now, as generative AI begins to scrape and regurgitate those same ratings, we’re reaching peak feedback loop. Entire queues snake around the block, not because something is good, but because it has gone viral or a large number of disparate consumers deem it worth our money and time.
I developed an aversion to unnecessary queuing after I spent a brief stint in New York, where lining up for restaurants and bars is such a normalised part of going out. Among my local friends, the line itself often seemed to be the attraction – a badge of honour and visible proof of insider knowledge.
But standing in a long line actually detracts from the experience for me, no matter how impressive the end result is supposed to be. Take for example Livraria Lello in Porto, regarded as one of the world’s most beautiful bookshops. Was it visually arresting? Yes. Was it worth a 30-minute wait to be funnelled into sardine-packed crowds jostling for the privilege of buying an overpriced copy of The Little Prince? No.
When travelling to Tokyo, I kept hearing that teamLab Planets – an immersive, interactive digital art museum – was the unmissable experience, so popular that 70% of international visitors purchase tickets despite it having no cultural or historic connection to Japan. Of all the things I did in Tokyo, it was the most hyped yet the most personally disappointing.
As travellers, we hold the illusion that we can protect ourselves from dissatisfaction through research, so we outsource recommendations to uncredentialed strangers who may have been paid or incentivised to provide positive reviews.
But in doing so we prevent ourselves from the joy of serendipity and surprise. Last year alone, I ate my way my way through more than 30 cities and towns, and many of the best meals I discovered were ones I never would have chosen had I consulted online reviews and ratings first, such as the piping hot grilled meat I feasted on in a Windhoek market and the sizzling tacos I sourced on the streets of Mexico City.
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Who reviews the reviewers?
We all know that crowdsourced reviews aren’t a reliable compass due to inherent subjectivity, the proliferation of fake posts and the prevalence of pay-to-praise schemes. Google reports having to remove or block more than 240 million policy-violating reviews from 2024.
A lack of vetting on review platforms also means they could be anyone – a thoughtful witness, a bored troll, or anything in between – and yet their appraisals are presented with authority.
Unverified identity aside, a reviewer’s opinion may be shaped by the circumstances around their experience and even who they were with. According to an analysis of more than 125,000 New York hotel reviews, guests travelling with partners left the most glowing reviews, while solo and business travellers were more critical.
Most reviews are born of intensity, too. A major 2020 study of 280 million-plus reviews across 25 platforms found that frequent reviewers tend to be more negative, while infrequent reviewers are more positive. This leaves a polarised pile of love-it-or-hate-it extremes and little honesty in the middle ground. People speak up when they’re thrilled or furious – but rarely when they’re satisfied.
Of course, customers even use reviews as a form of retaliation; a tool to manipulate public perception, cause moral outrage or punish businesses they feel have slighted them or fell short of their expectations.
So, since we know that reviews can be gamed, why do we put so much stock into what they supposedly tell us? In 2017, the filmmaker and prankster Oobah Butler showed that it was possible to make a fake restaurant (the fictitious Shed at Dulwich) the top-rated spot in London. Why, you might ask? Because, he decried: ‘People don’t trust their senses above what they read online anymore’.
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A call for serendipity
When we outsource our instincts to stars and ratings, spontaneity slips away. We stop improvising and wandering down side streets to see what’s there. We stop choosing the seafront cafe with plastic yellow chairs because something about it pulls us in. Choices we once made for ourselves get sacrificed to anonymous consensus and we give away our agency as travellers. Review culture now dictates which beaches, hotels, hikes, galleries, day trips and even which parts of a city we believe hold value.
If I had lived like that, I would have missed some of the most precious experiences of my life. I would have avoided the Krakow restaurant where ‘the decoration is nice, but the staff is not,’ according to one review. While, in real life, the waiters appreciated my attempts to order in Polish and helped me perfect my pronunciation.
Review paralysis is robbing travellers of the curiosity and genuine discovery once celebrated by yesterday’s explorers. Writer John Steinbeck warned that ‘the certain way to be wrong’ on a journey is to think you control it. Author Lawrence Block observed that our happiest moments often come from accidental discoveries and eternal escapist Henry David Thoreau believed that ‘the only people who ever get any place interesting are the people who get lost.’ It’s hard to get lost tethered to the thoughts of thousands in our pockets, isn’t it?
Serendipity and imperfection are not inconveniences; they are often vital ingredients for meaningful experiences. So, when taking your next bite out of the world, let your own senses do the reviewing instead of only choosing adventures others approve of. After all, there’s an innate explorer within all of us. Your adventure instinct is what got you to leave home and travel halfway around world. So, why not have faith that it can lead you to the hidden-away restaurants, bars and experiences, too. Transcendent or terrible: in the future, why not let the choice be yours?
Follow your inner adventure instinct and explore the path less travelled with Intrepid.
