How strong is the Rick Steves effect on destinations, places that were once sleepy, undiscovered back door destinations, and suddenly this guidebook writer plays them up? I am about to find out in a dramatic way, as I’m headed to an area of Italy known as the Cinque Terre, a place that Rick nearly single-handedly put on the overly-beaten path.
It’s mid-May as I write this, and in a few weeks I’m headed to Torino (Turin), Italy for an academic conference in my field, Linguistics. As is my wont, when traveling like this I tend to think of the add-ons, where else I can visit now that I’m in Italy. Afterwards, I’m heading south to Genoa, as it looks absolutely fab, and then I noticed I’m an hour and a half from Cinque Terre.
En guard. This is not an automatic add. Permit me a brief introduction, if needed. The Cinque Terre are five tiny villages all clinging to the coast in an area now dubbed the “Italian Riveria” by people encouraging tourism. They were largely unknown back in the 1970s, but became famous because they are (1) picturesque beyond comprehension, (2) on the sea coast, (3) have a vibe of being get-away spots from the normal beaten path, and especially (4) because Rick Steves found them and put them in his guidebooks.
Let’s go back a bit on Rick. Steves first made a guidebook called “Europe through the Back Door” in the early 1980s, something I read later in my 20s, about traveling cheap, sleeping in flophouses (yeah), and finding “back doors” to discover Europe. Decades ago, Cinque Terre was a find, a back door, a place tourists didn’t go, a place to see the real Europe.
Fast forward several decades and the place is now overrun with tourists, so many of them there because of Rick. He even has a separate guidebook now dedicated just to this little place. Add in the cruise ship passengers coming from nearby port of La Spezia and the day-trippers from places like Pisa, and these tiny (not exaggerating here) villages are utterly overrun.
Thus Cinque Terre has become the exemplar of what’s called the Rick Steves effect, when a place gets into a popular guidebook, and now everyone visits. It’s not a get-away anymore, and you may need another place to get away from it.
Nota bene: I like Rick Steves, really I promise I do. He’s an advocate for responsible travel and a very decent guy. I would drink wine with him any time. I still use his guide books all the time because for what they cover, they’re the best (although their coverage is particularly limited). He goes into far more detail than the others, and his walking tours of certain sights are often worth what you would pay for a real guided tour. That said, he’s not off the hook. Read on.
And yet, I’m going to the Cinque Terre despite the surely massive crowds. I’m writing this story before my trip, to record the experience of nervously planning a visit to an over-touristed spot and mentally wrestling with my cognitive dissidence over it. Part 2 shall be written afterwards, which will be either a sigh of relief or a cantankerous screed.
Wait! Why are you going??
This blog is about flophouses after all, about traveling low and decently cheap and that usually means not on the extremely beaten path. Few of us truly travel off the beaten path, but we somewhat try to avoid the crowds. Still, sometimes you go where everyone else goes.
Just before the pandemic, I was planning a trip to Greece, one evening talking about it to a Greek named Theo I had just met, a friend of my sister. I told him about my photography hobby. “Photography?” he said quickly, “then go to Santorini.” I explained to him my snobbery about traveling to overly-popular places, but he was having none of it, quickly and firmly reminding me that popular places are often popular for darn good reasons. His attitude was one should not dismiss popular places; there are reasons to go.
He had quite a point. I did too, and yet, I ended up going to Santorini. (read all about it here) Still, I have rarely encountered the crush of tourists I saw at Oai there at sunset, and wonder if Cinque Terre will be the same. Plus, due to my schedule, which I can’t change because of the conference, I’ll be at Cinque Terre in late May and I can’t make it work any other way except to be there on a weekend. Two days there, a Saturday and Sunday. I’m doomed.
I know a few others who have been and liked it. A friend Brett has been and survived. A beloved former bartender of mine named Kelsey went as part of her first trip to Italy and liked it so much she altered her travel plans on the spot to stay there longer than scheduled. I respect Kelsey quite much and that was a large factor. (bartenders know things)
Plus, like Santorini, it just looks so damn gorgeous. “Tom’s law of travel photography” says if you want to get a beautiful travel photo, go to someplace beautiful and take a photo. I’ve said before, if your photos of Iceland come out bad, it’s your fault, only yours. Cinque Terre is gorgeous. If you don’t know it, google “cinque terre” right now, click on “images” in the results, and you’ll be convinced to go as well. It looks that good.
The Rick Steves Effect
Again: I like Rick Steves, a lot. He means well, nothing but well, towards his finds and he encourages people to travel for good reasons. If you read his early books, he sounds like a chill, cool stoner out for a good time, and now decades later he comes across as your campy but fun uncle.
One of my constant issues with him is his guidebooks don’t cover the entire country (whatever country), only the places Rick has chosen. Those targets are covered well, but others get no mention. I get it, as he’s not going to cover everyplace, because one cannot research everyplace. But that means that his Italy guidebook, for instance, leaves out all kinds of areas. No Turin, no Genoa, no Parma, and nothing south of Naples.
Rick’s history of guidebooks was not like Fodor or Frommer or Lonely Planet. Rather, Rick wanted to lead you by the nose on a tour of the country. His first guidebooks were entitled “22 Days in…” the country, like Italy. And then he’d detail exactly what you should do, as if you were on one of his guided tours. So fly into Rome first, then to destination2, then to destination3, and so forth. If you wanted a different route, that’s up to you.
Rick is famous for giving incredibly detailed instructions, which I like quite much. A standard guidebook will tell you that after you arrive at the train station in Bratislava, it’s a ten-minute walk into town. Rick’s books will tell you to exit the station at door #3, turn left at the first sidewalk, and head for the green church steeple next to Maria’s Bakery, to get into town. I love that about him.
I can picture Rick traveling someplace, walking out the train station, wasting seven minutes figuring out which exit to use and which way to walk, and then deciding to put that small but valuable detail in his guidebook, so others won’t make the same mistake. Why would any writer not tell its readers to use exit #3 and then keep left towards the church with the green tower? That’s the Rick mentality.
And yet. As Rick got more popular, we found out the effect of leading people by the nose. Telling them to start in Rome, stay here, eat here, and then go to here1, here2, here3, created thousands of people doing that particular route.
This didn’t affect Rome so much, as people would come here anyway. But when Rick discovers an off-track destination and puts it in the guidebook, suddenly thousands of people show up. When he details a step-by-step 22-day trip that includes out-of-the-way places and suddenly thousands of people are trying to do that exact thing, it doesn’t work. (sorry about all the hyphens in that sentence)
Here’s an example from Switzerland, from vintage Rick. For years, in his guidebook he promoted a place in the central Bernese Oberland region called Gimmelwald (not nearby Grindelwald), a tiny, tiny village, perhaps not even that big. It was one of his original “back doors”. Population as of 2020 was 130. For decades, he has advised people to come here, to stay in one place where a man named Walter Mittler runs an inn and sometimes cooks dinner for the guests.
“Rick Steves has made me a rich man,” said Walter in an interview perhaps 20 years ago. Imagine tens of thousands of people trying to do this route, to a tiny village of 130 and a single inn run by one man. This is great advice to your friends or to a small audience, but Rick surely, eventually, knew how many people were buying his book, and how many are trying to show up at Walter’s place every day.
We have finally come to the large issue of this essay: Gimmelwald and Cinque Terre and others are little villages, with a very limited places to stay or eat, and Rick directed hundreds of thousands of people there, all of them dreaming to show up for, say, Walter’s homecooking. And so this is the point of this essay where I ask: What the frak was he thinking?
Did he not know that his books were getting popular and that a village of 130 people can’t withstand such an influx? That Walter and others cannot feed tens of thousands of people every year? That a village of just a few hundred will utterly change because of this? This effect must have happened suddenly, when he got popular, but within a handful of years it surely was obvious that a guidebook writer can’t direct everyone towards one tiny area. This is quite something that I don’t understand how Rick didn’t understand.
No, the effect is not all bad. Another place Rick directed people too is Civita di Bagnoregio, just north of Rome, a tiny, OMG tiny place that only had a dozen or more residents when I visited, back in my 20s (yes, because of Rick’s guidebook). This was a great find, then. I ate at the only place in town, Il Forno, a wonderful meal served by a waitress so beautiful I would have changed my life’s plans for her back then. (and I’ve wondered whatever happened to her. Contact me, okay?)
The place would have been deserted. It’s too out-of-the-way and impractical, but because of being in Rick’s guidebook, outsiders with money started buying up some property, and some architecture students from the University of Washington moved in. But today, it’s dead, no more full-time residents, and perhaps would be abandoned and ruined. If not for Rick Steves. He saved that place.
An alternative view: The Lonely Planet Effect
Another term is the “Lonely Planet Effect” a term that a shocking number of bloggers somehow believes they personally invented. Google that phrase and you’ll find 500 articles of people saying about a place, “it suffers from what I call the Lonely Planet effect.”
It’s the same thing as the Rick effect, except it doesn’t usually affect a small area like the Cinque Terra—it affects a larger region like Goa or Tuscany, or a country like Laos. The other effect is individual restaurants and hotels that get in the guide can become crazy popular while the ones right next to them are not. I will never, never forget walking into a restaurant in Dalat, Vietnam and of a dozen occupied tables, nearly every one had a Lonely Planet guidebook laying on it.
Moreover, the people attracted by Lonely Planet tend to be younger, formerly the backpacker crowd, while the Rick Steves fans (Rickniks) are 50 and over.
Lonely Planet has become the largest guidebook company, a brand that has been through much. The founders, backpackers Tony and Maureen Wheeler, sold 75% of the company in 2007 to the BBC and the rest in 2011, and then the BBC dumped it as a loss. Travel guide sales peaked in 2008, and have been going down since then. The Wheelers got out at a grand time. The company went through a few hands before landing at an American company Red Ventures in 2020. During my own formative years, Lonely Planet was like a bible, but now it’s just another guidebook. Honestly, I have hated it for the last ten years, at least. It used to be for backpackers, and now it doesn’t know what it wants to be. I’ll probably never buy another one.
The Fodors and Frommers Effect
No, no one talks about them. Not even sure if they’re still making books.
Let’s go back to Rick, because I’m not quite done with him. Rick Steves and company know the effect they have created, and they realize the outsized influence they have on this area. It’s not the only place he has saturated with visitors. Some years, ago Rick promoted one small street in Paris, Rue Cler, only a few blocks long, as the place to go, and seemingly some locals now call it “Rue Rick Steves”
I’m not sure in the late 70s, when Rick Steves started, that people even had a sense of “see it before it’s ruined”. That may be a very modern mentality. They truly may have not known they themselves would ruin it.
And of course it’s not just Rick. It’s the massive influx of tourist groups from all over, North America and Asia and beyond, plus the Europeans who have been going there before we knew about it. It’s the damn cruise ships who flood a place with 4,000 tourists all at once. The number of people who can afford to travel is skyrocketing, but the beaten path hot spots have not.
So What?
So what is that I’m nervous about going to Cinque Terre and I’m using this useless and under-read travel blog to complain about it. I’m not sure if I should feel stupid for going to a mega-popular place or proud that I’m going even if it’s crowded, an anti-snob. I’m nervous about it being crowded and not being able to get into a restaurant because they’re all full.
Research has shown me a million blog posts on the Cinque Terra, including dozens just solely on how to avoid the crowds there; that’s their only topic, which says much. One post was about Cinque Terra off the beaten path, which uh, there is no unbeaten path there. Even the villages around the five villages are crowded. The population of all five towns together might be around 4,000, yeah, but 2.5 million people visit every year.
I found Santorini, Greece to be very, very touristy, but not unbearably so. One could get away from the crowds, except in one place, the most popular, the small town of Oai. That’s the only place where the crowds were so thick it was hard to walk through the streets. A regular street there felt like a subway platform at rush hour. Come sunset, everyone rushed any walkway that offered a view, and I found myself taking photos of the crowds themselves. That’s my fear.
I’ll be in Cinque Terre in a few weeks. Stay tuned for Part 2, the aftermath.
