I didn’t think much of TripAdvisor when I first met the website’s founder, Steve Kaufer, in a coffee shop in Newton, Massachusetts, in 2003. A highly successful dot.com entrepreneur, Kaufer had already sold his first company for many millions and could have retired. Instead, he devoted himself to the world of travel, a world he seemed to know very little about. I met with Kaufer twice to try to sell him on the idea to use local travel experts for the most popular destinations on TripAdvisor—Las Vegas, Orlando, New York. He didn’t listen me, opened up the website to the public, and became far richer while I’m still plugging away for free on this blog. He knew something inherent in the human race. People love to bitch or rave about their vacation. But are these rantings a useful source to book your next vacation? Not really.

There’s always been an underlying problem with the public critiquing a destination or hotel, which is primarily what TripAdvisor focuses on. Very few people have any basis of comparison. Unlike one of my favorite food websites, Chowhound, where locals chime in on their favorite restaurants in say, Boston or Queens, locals don’t know the hotels in their own city. That mattress at the Fairmont Copley in Boston could be old as Paul Revere and I wouldn’t have the slightest idea. But ask me about the top restaurants in the city and I’ll happily delve into a long diatribe.

So what we’re left with are the reviews of people who have visited a hotel for the first time in Montego Bay, Jamaica. They give us their five cents worth, but have no way to compare that hotel with the one next door and the one next door to that. This is the sole reason I still rely on guidebooks and travel writers who specialize in Jamaica. They’ve seen every hotel in the country and can easily tell me which ones are the best and which ones are the worst. Most importantly, good travel writers would tell me to steer clear of Montego Bay, where you’re constantly harassed by Jamaicans who want to sell you pot, coffee, carvings, whatever.  A good travel writer would tell you to head to the far more peaceful hamlet of Port Antonio or the long stretch of beach in Negril.

Therein lies the underlying problem with the majority of travel websites like TripAdvisor. They assume you already know where to go and can then look through their list of hotels for the right one. But unless you’re a travel writer, travel consultant, or avid traveler, you wouldn’t know that the main isle of Tahiti in French Polynesia is congested and citified, a far cry from the exquisite beauty of Bora Bora and Raitea. That you can drive off-road on safari in Masai Mara and get close-up shots of those sleeping lions, unlike Serengeti where you have to stay on the main road. That many of the Caribbean isles have been reduced to generic cruise ship hubs, devoid of any local culture. That the island of Folegrandros is the real Greece few will write about, sending you to Santorini instead. You have to do your research, which I’ll talk about tomorrow.