Tbilisi, Georgia: Notes on a Terrible Time

Not all is what is seems

I didn’t publish a post last week, but I have a good excuse. I moved not once, not twice, but three times. Somewhere between moves two and three, my stomach revolted, and I started getting very sick. I have been in Tbilisi, Georgia for a week, and have spent most of my time just trying to find a decent place to stay. Nothing was as advertised, but it wasn’t just hosts and landlords who were to blame: I was also stymied by a problem that I think now confronts travelers and non-travelers alike, which is the total unreliability of online reviews today. You may have noticed that a great many mediocre or even bad things are given deceptively good reviews. AirBnB is among the worst offenders. Properties that range from just drab to hazardous to human health have dozens of five-star reviews and comments from previous guests about how “perfect” their stay was. Part of this is surely the saccharine American positivity culture (“amazing!”, “the best!”) gone global. Of course, it’s not just AirBnB. Google will wildly mislead you too. Many of the five-star reviews for everything from restaurants to salons you see are surely fake. It’s not that hard to game. Of course, all of this sounds inconsequential given the current state of the world – the consumer satisfaction of the laptop class is a “first world problem” – but the proliferation of deceptive reviews, and the rise of online ranking systems as measures of trust, are also a symptom of something bigger and darker.