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Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

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jbverschoor·

The problem is not google. It’s trip advisor itself. It’s simply not helpful anymore.

Fake reviews, and they’re pushing paid events etc using dark patterns.. it wasn’t like that some years ago

Love the lonely planet

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This!

I used to visit Tripadvisor a lot, but then, with time the site became less and less useful - always pushing the next tour, next paid event,

complete disregard to what the site was supposed to be, advice about trips

Hence I stopped visiting altogether.

Whenever I want to look up the highlights of a place, I look up it's Lonely Planet page. They are written well and have good pictures. The way to compete against a million random reviewers is by upping quality and forming a brand. In some places, Lonely Planet is the only company providing accurate and complete information. It's marvelous.

Unfortunately Lonely Planet's old business model of getting people to pay for content itself has basically stopped working now that there's a million free digital competitors, and they've yet to come up with a replacement that does.

The app is really really cheap. Fair to say underpriced, especially compared to the books. No ads. Quality content. A good structure about essentials and the neighborhoods.

Yes trip advisor has become irrelevant, in the beginning you could rely on the ratings. Now almost everyone has 4+ stars.

I find Google ratings slighly better.

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