Relying on the Internet to Choose a Vacation Rental Can Lead to a Puzzling and Difficult Experience

Stupefied by the experience of venturing outdoors into temperatures of 15°F my wife and I decided last winter that we would treat ourselves to a week in the tropics during the early days of March. And after we'd discovered that such quick-stays were already sold out in various locations in Florida, we hit upon a better solution: We'd go to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where it was reliably hot. We would rent a comfortable condo for that week.

Out came the laptop and on came the listings in VRBO.com, Homeaway.com, and Rentalo.com. But what a buzzing and blooming confusion! We were confronted with literally scores of possible rentals, all of them seeming alike, all of them profusely illustrated with photos of bedrooms indistinguishable from each other, all of them supported by breathless descriptions composed by the owners of each flat. As for those famous user-generated recommendations, these were equally impossible to decipher. Seventy-eight persons found each condo to be fine, 59 persons found them to be "terrible." Whom to believe?

And then a thought occurred. We'd go to a guidebook. And what a relief. There, in the relevant pages, was a calm appraisal of several leading properties in the Condado Beach area and Isla Verde, of which it was obvious that the experienced author was enamored of three in particular. The choice became easier, the selection was made, and in the early days of March, 2012, we flew off with confidence to the sands of San Juan.

Call me prejudiced, call me stubborn, but I will remain enamored of travel guidebooks for the rest of my life. I will enjoy relying on the judgment of a skilled journalist who is writing the third or fourth yearly edition of a guide that bears his or her name and on which they'd placed their personal stamp of approval. I will depend on the obvious self-interest of a publisher who wants the readers of that guide to be pleased with its results, so that they'll buy another such guide to another destination at some time in the future.

Does that made me a Luddite, a stick-in-the-mud? I'd claim otherwise. And I'll leave it to you to decide.