A Wikitraveler Goes to Thailand

What’s it like to leave Lonely Planet at home and travel to Thailand guided only by resources on the Internet? It’s an interesting question, but the resulting Slate story by Tim Wu, unfortunately, poses more questions than it answers. “The Internet has long been terrible for travelers—full of sham sites designed to lure visitors to selected hotels, or, in Thailand’s case, go-go bars,” he writes. The Internet has long been terrible for travelers? Huh?

Sure there are “sham” travel sites, just as their are sham blogs and sham banking sites and sham news sites. But for many years the Internet has been a gold mine, particularly for savvy and adventurous travelers. Never before have travelers had so many good resources at their fingertips and, unfortunately, Wu barely taps into them. As a “confessed Wikipedia addict, sometime contributor, and true believer,” he tries to navigate Thailand using Wikitravel. Wikitravel fails him, so he turns to travelfish.org. And that’s it. Halfway through the trip he buys a copy of Lonely Planet Thailand.

Sigh. That’s not, as the story’s subhead promises, touring Thailand with only the Internet as a guide. It’s giving up.

To Wu’s credit, he does make at least one fine point: Wikitravel may not be the best forum for travel information. He writes: “Useful travel writing is all about accurate information paired with stark opinion, not consensus or deliberative democracy.”

Related on World Hum:
* I Don’t Want to Travel with a Guidebook. What Do You Think About Traveling With an Atlas?

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