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. They also might not understand the publication process involved. They should think again. 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.
Prices are wrong, directions are wrong.
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. Pretty soon, every publisher and his neighbor were trying to get into this market. People were given deadlines they couldn't meet and amounts of money they couldn't even live off.