Why Generic Travel Advice is Ruining Guest Experiences
Tispiti Blog. Made for everyone, curated by locals.
(And What Real Recommendations Do Better)
Travel advice isn’t hard to find anymore. It’s everywhere. Aggregated lists of travel recommendations, anonymous reviews, content mills, chatbots – all feeding into a bloated system of “top 10s" and “can’t-miss” attractions, most of which have been copied, scraped, or paraphrased a dozen times over.
It’s efficient, sure. But that efficiency has flattened the experience. The result? Guests who arrive in a new place and are funnelled toward the same tired handful of places, served up by algorithms that have no sense of context, taste, or curiosity.
The problem isn’t access. It’s curation.
We’ve reached a strange point in travel where it’s possible to research obsessively and still end up with a mediocre experience.
You can have 27 tabs open, each with a different article or guide, and still wind up at the same overhyped brunch spot that an army of influencers posted last year – because it ranked high, looked good in photos, and had a thousand positive reviews from people you’ll never meet.
The issue isn’t that travelers are lazy or uninformed. It’s that the tools meant to help them have become optimized for volume, not value.
They’re designed to answer the question:
“What are people talking about?” Not: “What’s actually worth your time?”
Generic advice is easy to give. But it rarely lands.
If you’ve ever asked a hotel concierge for recommendations and ended up with a laminated list of TripAdvisor darlings, you’ve felt this. If you’ve ever been sent to a “hidden gem” with a line out the door and a $14 smoothie menu, you’ve definitely felt this.
It’s not that these places are bad – it’s that the recommendation lacks intention. It wasn’t given with context, nuance, or care. It’s generic, recycled, and impersonal.
The guest experience suffers when guidance is treated like a checkbox. And if you’re in hospitality – whether you’re running a hotel, hosting on Airbnb, or driving rideshare – that matters. Because the difference between a 4-star and a 5-star review often comes down to the details. A moment of thoughtfulness. A local recommendation that actually resonates.
So What Makes Real Recommendations Different?
They don’t come from rankings or aggregated sentiment. They come from familiarity – from people who move through a city every day. The kind of lived-in knowledge that quietly accumulates over time: where to go, when to go, and what actually matters once you’re there.
Real recommendations carry context. They understand that a neighborhood cafe feels different in the morning than it does at dusk. That some places are perfect for a one-day visit, while others reward the kind of time most travelers don’t have. Not everything needs to be squeezed into the same “must-see” list – and good curation knows when to leave things out.
They also respect time. Advice without context tends to flatten everything, as if a person with 36 hours in a city needs the same guidance as someone staying a full season. But real recommendations help travelers filter what’s worth their attention – not based on popularity, but on relevance.
And often, the things that land aren’t dramatic. They’re quiet. A side-street bakery that sells out before noon. A jazz bar tucked above a hardware shop. A local park that doesn't make a single “top 10” list but gives a city its texture. These are the kinds of places that soften the unfamiliar – the ones that turn a trip into something that actually sticks.
Better travel doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from discovering what matters – and sometimes, that just takes the right nudge from someone who knows where to look.
