I need to go on holiday – somewhere that I know the food will be good , somewhere with a kids club, and somewhere not too far from the airport.

‘Has anyone got any recommendations?’ you may ask a set of four friends at the pub.

“Don’t have kids”,  “I stayed at this brilliant Michelin starred castle in France a few years ago where the food was fantastic”, “ Not too far from the airport – the Greek islands are best for that” - friends recommendations when they are culled from a sample of four people who you have the occasional once a month outing with, are probably not going to come up with the right answer.

However, broaden that circle of friends to 10 or 20, and the chances are that you will get a variety of different answers each of which ticks all your boxes. It’s because we tend to have friends, who are vaguely similar to us and hence have the same requirements as us if you broaden the net beyond your immediate drinking pals.

Yet this is a group who are rarely consulted on such things as the best place to go on holiday. Instead we take the view of a travel agent or Google or some random reviewer, who has posted something up on TripAdvisor. Lots of money is then invested on the basis of someone you have never come across, telling you what you should do.

Which is slightly insane. In fact, very insane.

The recommendations you get from any search engine is skewed by a whole number of factors – all based on an inamimate object processing data. So last year I was looking for a digital camera to buy someone for Christmas. And indeed I duly bought one – that at the time was high spec, good value and I was happy with my purchase. For the last 6 months, my inbox has been clogged with offers , from the retailer I bought it from for better quality, better value digital cameras that have undermined my purchase decision. I now feel conned.

I really don’t trust computers as a source of intelligent recommendation – is it any wonder?

I do trust my broad circle of friends though – human beings who are concerned that they don’t give you duff information.

‘Better the devil you know’.

There are certain friends, who I would go to for certain recommendations with a 100% certainty that their recommendation on a particular subject area was going to be brilliant. On another subject area, they might be terrible or just very different to what you are looking for. The brain is far better at filtering stuff than any collection of data – we are after all humans.

James.

It takes years to build a reputation and only a day to destroy it.

Last week, there was a story about a hotel in New York, which had to close because of some nasty reviews that had been written about it on TripAdvisor. Apparently staff were seen smoking weed in the bedrooms as they went about their cleaning duties, rats were prevalent in the kitchens and mattresses stank of urine.

Yet this had been a well-respected family run hotel, that had done well for many years.

According to the friend that told me this story, the negative reviews were posted by a rival hotel rather than real customers.

The fact that there were lots of really favourable reviews on TripAdvisor for this same hotel becomes irrelevant if you think there’s a chance that your mattress is going to smell of urine – however good the other aspects of the hotel may be. TripAdvisor, to be fair, does give any hotel the chance to respond to this type of comment, but who would you believe?

“I stayed in that hotel and the mattress stunk of wee”
OR
“ I can assure guests that if any mattress stunk of wee, it would be replaced immediately”

Recommendations from people you trust though are worth their weight in gold.

They may not always be good recommendations but if you know the person providing the recommendation, chances are that you will be able to put it into context. If one of your friends has got a bad breath problem and they recommend a particular product for easing the problem, that’s a very valuable reccomendation. Compare that to a beautiful celebrity endorsing a fresh breath product – you sort of know that they only endorse it for the money and you suspect that their celebrity breath smells beautiful anyway.

That probably explains why, in a recent study, friends recommendations were trusted by 65% of people and only 8% trusted those of a celebrity. Yet still many brands spend millions on getting celebrity endorsement and they wouldn’t do that if it didn’t work.

The moral of the story – if you want to buy something or go somewhere, before you do nything else , ask your friends.