Many follow blindly recommendations from sites like Tripadvisor on their travel in Iceland.
Unfortunately few people seem to travel anywhere these days without checking thoroughly all reviews about their hotels, places, restaurants and tours before going anywhere. Almost like sites like Tripadvisor, Virtual Tourist or other such have cemented their place as the holy bible of travel. What a sad evolution.
On the face of it this might seem a good idea. Nobody wants to stay in a lice-ridden room in a crummy back-alley in any country. Neither does anyone want to sign up with a tour company notorious for cheating its customers.
But there is a whole lot Tripadvisor reviews do not reveal and all the recommendation stickers and plaques now found in most places are next to worthless. Team Total Iceland knows of at least three local companies supposedly “recommended by Tripadvisor” but all just “borrowed” stickers from another place.
Indeed, Total Iceland posted, as a test, a Tripadvisor recommended logo on its website for two days recently. Nobody said anything but inquiries went up a bit.
Tripadvisor itself or reviewers know nothing about which tourist companies pay minimum wage to its staff or if they even pay minimum wage at all. Quite a lot of people in the tourism industry in Iceland are foreigners brought here to work very cheaply and some even just work for food and a bed. Some are paid in cash and yet others are never paid at all.
Tripadvisor knows nothing about price-fixing among tourism companies. A lot of individuals ferrying you around in 4×4 vehicles in Iceland belong to an organization found guilty of massive price-fixing recently.
Neither does Tripadvisor inform you if a certain hotel has raised their prices 130 per cent in just one year. That very same hotel boasts the very highest honor the US company can award. And you get no information from Tripadvisor about which hotel owner is at war with sites like Airbnb or such rental agencies trying to offer tourist cheaper alternatives to hotels.
No. Tripadvisor travelers just blow out recommendations and many blindly follow. We suggest you keep things in perspective next time you happen upon a “recommendation” or a “certificate of excellence.” Better yet, check the reviews but don´t follow blindly.
