mcat, you can haunt tripadvisor. Many of us won’t leave home without it. Seriously.
Thanks. I rarely travel so I do not know much about this subject. But I think I have bumped into that site accidentally a few times in the past when googling. I learn “tripadvisor” is a useful site for travelers today. (Just like bogleheads.org is useful for picking up investment knowledge.)
Fodors.com forum and the rest of the site has tons of travel info too.
I used to buy their books before the Internet age. Nowadays, I think we have several “problems”: The quality of the information we could find on the Internet is uneven and there may be too much information and most info out there is either repeated or erroneous/misleading. The information in the printed book tends to be quickly out-dated.
So people are hungry for some information about where to find the relevant, up-to-date, and high quality information. (CC could be a good starting point for the totally uninitiated - and its content is often more fun to read, and easier to digest and contains answers to a wide variety of questions - and it is “interactive” and is played out in real time sometimes. I sometimes feel I am somewhat addicted.)
But both Fodor’s and Tripadvisor (and some super others) include forums. I’ve had unique questions answered on both. Relevant, up to date- and specific. That’s the point. In fact, when D1 went to Africa, I advocated she change hotels based on feedback from recent travelers to that city and who made a certain side trip. When we traveled to the 3rd world country where she lived, we scoped out everything on TA. Same when she went to Spain (there are great backpacker sites, too, where people share details about things like hostels and transpo, security and late night fun.)
The fodors.com forum is very current and has a lot of very well-traveled folks posting.