Have you ever planned a trip online? In January, when I traveled to Amsterdam, I did all of the legwork online and ended up in a surprising place.

Amsterdam City Center is extremely easy to navigate. From the train station (a quick ride from the airport and a quick ride around The Netherlands), the canals extend outward like spokes. Each canal is flanked by streets. Then the city has a number of concentric rings emanating from the train station. Not only is the underlying map easy to navigate, there is a traveler station at the center and maps available periodically. English speaking tourists will see that not only do many people speak English, but Dutch has enough overlap with English to be comprehensible after even a short exposure.

But the city center experience was not as smooth for me. I studied map after map in the city center without finding my hotel. I asked for directions, and no one had heard of the hotel or the street it was on. The traveler center seemed flummoxed as well. Eventually I found someone who could help and found myself on a long commuter tram ride well outside the city center and tourist areas. The hotel had received great reviews and recommendations from many travelers. But clearly, the travelers who boasted about it were not quite the typical travelers, who likely would have ended up in one of the many hotels I saw from the tram window.

Have you ever discovered a restaurant online? I recently went to a nice, local restaurant that I’d been reading about for years. I ordered the truffle fries (fries with truffle salt and some kind of fondue sauce), because people had really raved about them, only to discover once they arrived that they were fundamentally french fries (totally not my bag- I hate fried food).

These review sites are not representative of anything. And yet we/I repeatedly use them as if they were reliable sources of information. One could easily argue that they may not be representative, but they are good enough for their intended use (fitness for purpose <– big, controversial notion from a recent AAPOR task force report on Nonprobability Sampling). I would argue that they are clearly not excellent for their intended use. But does that invalidate them altogether? They often they provide the only window that we have into the whatever it is that we intend them for.

Truffle fried aside, the restaurant was great. And location aside, the hotel was definitely an interesting experience.

Toilet capsule in hotel room (with frosted glass rotating pane for some degree of privacy)