Go See This Crap: Honest Travel Guides & Reviews

Honest Travel Guides, Destination Reviews & Firsthand Advice From People Who Actually Went There

Travel websites have an extraordinary ability to make every destination sound like paradise.

Apparently every hotel is luxurious, every small town is charming, every beach is pristine, and every tourist attraction is an unforgettable once-in-a-lifetime experience.

We’ve traveled enough to know better.

Go See This Crap is where we review the places, hotels, airlines, attractions, road trips, and experiences competing for your vacation money.

We want to answer a very simple question:

Is this place actually worth going to?

Sometimes the answer is absolutely.

Sometimes the destination is fantastic but the hotel isn’t.

Sometimes the supposedly minor attraction turns out to be the best part of the trip.

And sometimes you spend a small fortune traveling halfway across the country only to stare at something and think:

“Well…I guess we’re here now.”

Those experiences are useful too.

Travel Guides for People Who Actually Travel

Because the Brochure Already Told You Everything Is Wonderful

Our travel guides aren’t intended to be advertisements for tourism departments.

They’re meant to help you plan a trip.

That means talking about the things we’d want to know before leaving home:

• What is actually worth seeing?
• What can you skip?
• How difficult is it to get there?
• Is it accessible?
• How much time should you realistically spend there?
• What should you bring?
• What surprised us?
• What annoyed us?
• What would we do differently?
• And ultimately, was the experience worth the time and money?

We’ll tell you about the famous stuff.

We’ll also tell you about the overlook, restaurant, scenic road, historic site, ridiculous roadside attraction, or unexpected stop that turned out to be better than whatever we’d originally planned.

Because some of the best parts of traveling aren’t necessarily the things printed in 72-point type on the tourism brochure.

Explore Our Travel Guides →

Destination Reviews

We Went There So You Can Decide If You Should

Pictures can tell you what a place looks like.

They don’t always tell you what it’s like to actually be there.

That’s where our destination reviews come in.

We talk about the places we’ve visited from the perspective of normal travelers trying to enjoy themselves without wasting half the trip standing in a line, looking for parking, or discovering too late that we really should have brought something warmer.

Our current travel coverage includes destinations and experiences such as Muir Woods National Monument, Corpus Christi, Texas, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Colorado destinations, along with hotels, airlines, and attractions. [Honest Pro…el Reviews]

The goal isn’t to create another encyclopedia entry.

You can already find those.

We want to tell you:

What’s it actually like to go there?

Explore Destinations →

Colorado Travel

Mountains, Road Trips, Camping & Other Reasons to Leave the House

Colorado gives us an unfair advantage in the scenery department.

Mountains, forests, mining towns, scenic drives, campgrounds, historic sites and enough winding mountain roads to make the person sitting in the passenger seat reconsider breakfast.

But seeing Colorado properly takes more than punching a destination into GPS.

Our Colorado coverage focuses on practical trip planning and firsthand experience whenever we have it.

That includes:

• Camping
• Scenic drives
• Historic towns
• Mountain destinations
• Attractions
• Road trips
• Outdoor experiences
• Places that are actually worth making the detour to see

We’ll tell you about the destination.

But just as importantly, we’ll try to tell you the things we wish we’d known before we went.

Explore Colorado →

Hotels & Places to Stay

Because “Luxury” Is Apparently a Very Flexible Term

Hotel reviews are where marketing photographs and reality occasionally have a fistfight.

A hotel isn’t just somewhere to sleep.

It’s often one of the largest expenses of a trip, which means we’re interested in more than whether somebody put decorative pillows on the bed.

We care about:

• The room
• Comfort
• Cleanliness
• Location
• Amenities
• Noise
• Service
• Convenience
• Unexpected fees
• And whether what you received actually justified what you paid

Sometimes an expensive hotel earns every penny.

Sometimes the spectacular view is of architectural equipment.

Both are worth mentioning.

The site already has firsthand hotel coverage, including your Caesar’s Palace and Hotel Nikko San Francisco reviews. That’s exactly the sort of content I’d build this cluster around. [Honest Pro…el Reviews]

Explore Hotel Reviews →

Airline Reviews

Because Getting There Is Apparently Half the Bullshit

Before you can admire the mountains, check into the hotel, or stand underneath a tree the size of an apartment building, somebody has to get you there.

Sometimes that’s an airline.

Airline reviews are particularly difficult because one flight isn’t every flight. Routes, aircraft, crews, weather and airports can all affect the experience.

So rather than declaring an airline universally fantastic or terrible from one trip, we’ll tell you what happened on ours.

Was check-in painless?

Were the seats tolerable?

Was the crew good?

Did the experience justify the price?

Would we choose them again?

And perhaps the greatest achievement available in modern commercial aviation:

Did we arrive where we intended to go with our luggage?

Your site already has a dedicated airline-review area and firsthand Delta coverage, so I’d treat this as a real sub-cluster rather than burying airline reviews among destinations. [Honest Pro…el Reviews]

Explore Airline Reviews →

Camping & The Great Outdoors

Nature Is Free. Apparently Everything Required to Visit It Isn’t.

Camping sounds beautifully simple.

You go outside. You put up a tent. You stare at the mountains.

Then you discover you need reservations, equipment, food storage, water, layers, maps, fire information, campground details and enough equipment to make “sleeping outside” somehow cost several hundred dollars.

Our camping guides focus on the practical side of actually taking the trip.

That can include:

• Campgrounds and destinations
• Accessibility
• Facilities
• Trip planning
• Scenic areas
• Useful gear
• What to bring
• What we’d leave at home
• Lessons learned from actually going there

And because this is ShouldIBuyThisCrap.com, this section gives us a completely natural bridge between travel and product reviews.

If we’ve used a piece of gear on the road or at camp, we’ll tell you how it worked in the real world.

Explore Camping Guides →

Attractions & Experiences

Is It Worth Paying Extra for This Crap?

Not everything worth reviewing comes in a box.

Museums, tours, theme parks, movie experiences, historic attractions and assorted tourist traps all compete for the same thing products do:

your money.

And some experiences are absolutely worth paying for.

Your existing D-BOX movie-seat review is actually a great example of why an Experiences category makes sense alongside travel. Your homepage currently presents it among recent content. [Honest Pro…el Reviews]

The same question applies whether we’re talking about an attraction or a vibrating movie seat:

Was it worth paying for?

That’s what we’ll try to answer.

Explore Attractions & Experiences →

How We Review Travel

Experience First, Bullshit Last

We aren’t pretending one visit makes us experts on an entire city.

A trip is a snapshot.

Weather changes. Hotels renovate. Restaurants close. Prices change. Airlines have good days and profoundly irritating ones.

That’s why we’ll try to distinguish between what we personally experienced and broader information we’ve researched to help you plan your own visit.

When we’ve personally stayed somewhere, we’ll say so.

When we’ve flown the airline, we’ll say so.

When we’ve driven the road, wandered through the park, slept in the hotel, or paid admission to the attraction, you’ll get our firsthand impressions.

And when something is based primarily on research rather than firsthand experience, we’ll make that clear too.

You don’t need another travel site confidently pretending its writer knows everything.

You need enough honest information to decide whether you want to go.

Who’s Going to See This Crap?

I’m Joe Zimmerman, owner and editor of ShouldIBuyThisCrap.com.

Travel is one of the reasons this section exists in the first place.

When I go somewhere, I inevitably come home thinking about what I’d tell somebody else who was planning the same trip.

Sometimes that’s:

“You absolutely need to see this.”

Sometimes it’s:

“This was great, but here’s what we screwed up.”

And occasionally:

“I cannot believe we paid that much for this.”

Those are all useful reviews.

I’m not a tourism board and I’m not interested in pretending every vacation was flawless.

I’m a traveler telling another traveler what happened.

That seems more useful anyway.

So, Should You Go See This Crap?

That’s what we’re here to figure out.

Maybe you’re planning a Colorado camping trip.

Maybe you’re trying to decide where to stay in San Francisco.

Maybe you’re wondering whether an expensive Las Vegas hotel deserves the money.

Maybe you’ve found some absurd roadside attraction three hours out of your way and need another human being to tell you whether this is a terrible idea.

You’ve come to the right place.

We’ll show you what we saw.

We’ll tell you what we liked.

We’ll tell you what irritated the hell out of us.

And we’ll give you the practical information we’d want before making the same trip.

Because life is short.

Vacation days are limited.

Gas is expensive.

Hotel rooms certainly aren’t getting cheaper.

If you’re going to go see some crap, it might as well be the good crap.

Start Exploring

Destination Guides →

Colorado Travel →

Hotel Reviews →

Airline Reviews →

Camping & Outdoors →

Attractions & Experiences →

All Travel Articles →