Guiding the guides

When touring Normandy for this summer’s break, I came across Les Plus Beaux Villages de France, which is a ranking of villages across the country based on their beauty and cultural heritage. The 170-plus locations in this exclusive club are judged by an association whose aim is to promote tourism.

This seemed to highlight the French appetite for classifications which also encompasses wine, wherein they have the Grand Cru and Premier Cru classes alongside myriad other very complex classifications that seek to put the country’s wine production into various supposedly easily-identifiable boxes. Many other countries have adopted similar methods to highlight quality levels.

The one French ranking system the hospitality industry is most aware of is undoubtedly the Michelin Guide and its one-to-three star classifications. They are as much embraced as they are deemed antiquated and pointless. For many people most of the year they have little relevance.

Until that is we reach these current summer months of the year when most of us find ourselves travelling and spending time in unknown areas. Guides and rankings such as Michelin then very much come into their own. They help solve the big problem of where we choose to eat and drink and help us avoid missing out on the best places within our individual budgets.

Serendipity is great but it’s insufficiently reliable for people like me who are paranoid about missing out on those hidden gems. The thought of dining in an average restaurant and then finding out the next day that a vastly superior place was just around the corner is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. Curiously, it’s the sort of thing that sends my wife to sleep!

The capacity to search for “best restaurants near me” and “best bars near me” via our phones has put into question the value of paid-for content such as guide books and many of the brands I used to rely on – notably Time Out. They have gradually been squeezed out of the market and we have instead been left with the likes of TripAdvisor, the various online booking platforms and other aggregators of reviews from the general public.?

While these sources have the upside of being free, this is their actual value in my opinion. There have been no occasions, however desperate, that I’ve felt the need to wholly rely on such sources on which to choose a hospitality venue. In my opinion, having a 1,000 reviews of a venue from random customers is less value than that of a single trusted source or reviewer.

This trust in a single, or small collective, of reviewers comes from buying into their thinking. It’s the same as buying into any brand where the opinions, ethos, editing and curating chimes with your own tastes and desires. My own preferences include the Campaign for Real Ale’s Good Beer Guide when I’m in search of beer-focused pubs rather than necessarily quaint venues and for food a Michelin star still means a great deal to me when choosing a restaurant for special occasions. I’m also an avid reader of the weekly reviews of independent diner Andy Hayler who mixes Michelin star venues with the championing of local favourites.

My other go-to is the Harden’s guide. You might argue that this simply corrals the reviews of random diners just like the online aggregators. But there is one major difference – it involves people in its collation. I’ve personally known two editors of the guide and the process very much involves taking the thousands of incoming reviews from diners and then coming to a house conclusion. This weeds out any outliers that invariably tarnish the online operators that seem to harbour their fair share of axe grinders, grudge holders and borderline blackmailers.

As we move deeper into a world that embraces artificial intelligence and the automated generation of content the potential for reviews and recommendations with zero human input or contact becomes increasingly high. This is worrying because it has the potential to mislead people or at best provide them with something of very little value. Amid these developments I’ll continue to rely on those hospitality guide books and reviews that still have humans at the heart of their production and ultimately deliver the sound opinions that I’m happy to buy into.

Glynn Davis, editor of Beer Insider

This piece was originally published on?Propel Info?where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. Beer Insider would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.