Independents must play by the rules
Visit your local bookshop and go to the section marked "guides". If you look up hotels, restaurants and pubs, you may be surprised by the range of volumes spread before you.
Take a closer look. You will probably find handbooks about the luxury hotels of Europe, and travelogues about the tea shops of Taunton. There could be listings of real-ale pubs in Yorkshire, and reports on the best country house hotels for fly fishing in Scotland. There's likely to be everything you want, including the established names in the hospitality guidebook genre; those thick paperbacks filled with close type and pithy descriptions of where to eat, drink and fall asleep.
Broadly speaking, you'll find that all these guides fall into two categories. There are those that seek payment for inclusion, prepared on a "pay-and-display" basis. And there are those that use objective (sometimes subjective) testimonials by independent inspectors.
The difference in approach is often the cause of self-righteous drum beating, and hostile rivalry between the two camps. Readers should be under no misapprehension about what they are buying, say the independents.
Competition is so intense that the Institute of Trading Standards Administration is getting involved, and is likely to call upon the Minister for Consumer Affairs to decide what should, or should not, be written on the covers of some guides.
Is this unacceptable? No, not if the standards are applied universally and consistently, and the guidebooks are judged fairly.
Step back into the bookshop for a moment. Your bookseller is telling you that the number of guides is on the increase. Why? Because the public keeps asking for more; the public can't get enough.
The market is growing and there is obviously room for both types of guide: the glossy brochure written by proprietors who know their establishments best, and the objective critique that provides an outsider's view. Neither is wrong; both have merits, so long as the facts are accurate.
It's not much to ask publishers to display clearly what method of compilation they use (that, reasonably, is part of the information that readers want), but the independent guides must agree to abide by the same arbitrator. In other words, they must be absolutely certain that they are truly independent and can stand up to the same scrutiny before they take the moral high ground. Otherwise they must expect to face the same castigation that they seek to impose on their rivals, and be prepared to pay the penalty.
Forbes Mutch
Editor
Caterer & Hotelkeeper
