Henry Alford's Exploration of Traditional and New Media Paths to Informed Travel Information

My wife and I visited Philadelphia this weekend without a guide. We managed to enjoy ourselves. However, it took a strenuous amount of planning to make the ten hours in the City of Brotherly Love a time to remember. That effort was necessary, even though I have visited Philadelphia repeatedly over the years. There was too much I didn't know about Philly, especially its local nuances and more adventurous restaurants and bars. I have some local contacts there, but I didn't refer to them for this trip.

The episode led me to consider how I would have planned a visit to another destination. Coincidentally,  the online edition of today's New York Times included a piece by the writer Henry Alford that demonstrated one approach to this issue. It is a well structured and intriguingly conceived article, in which Alford discusses a recent visit to Stockholm.

Henry Alford
(photograph from Vanity Fair)

At first, I was skeptical about the piece. Photographs of the musical Piroth sisters, links to too-cool-for-school bloggers from Nectar and Pulse and Spotted by Locals, and two references to "hipsters" led me to suspect this was yet another of the Times' demographically driven travel articles. Yet, Alford's ploy was a simple one. "What would happen," he wrote, "if you traveled to a country you’d never been to and relied on suggestions from blogs and online locals instead of those from friends and guidebooks?"


Alford does hedge his bets by going to friendly, safe, English-speaking Sweden. The mitigation of the language barrier makes his contact with locals a relatively painless maneuver not easily duplicated in, say, Bulgaria. However, Alford's proposition is a very interesting one, in that gets to the heart of the social media value proposition. By identifying his travel and other preferences, Alford could obtain travel information presumably consistent with his personality and desires. By the way, the writer, who is in his fifties, was completely comfortable considering experiences and sights bloggers half his age enjoyed.

In essence, Alford challenged both the strong case for "traditional," branded travel books and magazines as well as the "new media" approach to obtaining useful travel information. While his social media pathway may seem obvious, it is in practice a challenging proposition to successfully manage. One needs time, patience, a willingness to sift through bloggers' opinions, and destinations where Alford's type of travel research would pay dividends. It's one thing to check out hipster bastions such as Stockholm or Amsterdam; it's quite another to learn more insightful, reliable information about the hipster world's version of terra incognita.

We'll see if Alford's method works for me on my next trip to Philadelphia.