Why Slow Travel Matters in a Digital World

Visitors to a foreign city can now ask AI to generate lists of best restaurants and hotels, and ask it to create itineraries for them, and tell them what paintings are important to see in a museum. Does this mean tourists will hire guides and travel planners less? Will my skills and training become redundant?

Out of curiosity, I asked AI, for the first time, for its top recommended restaurants in Florence. It gave me the following list:

1. Enoteca Pinchiorri

2. Gucci Osteria da Massimo Bottura

3. Ristorante Borgo San Jacopo

4. Trattoria Mario

My eyes bugged out when I saw Trattoria Mario tacked on after those first three like a Vespa parked next to three Ferraris.

The first three are Michelin-starred restaurants requiring reservations weeks in advance and will set you back at least €150 per person. At Trattoria Mario, you wait in line for 20 minutes and spend €20.

An odd mismatch between luxury dining and a hole in the wall where you share a table with other diners crammed together on small wooden stools, and where hand-written menus in Italian haven’t changed since I first frequented the trattoria the 1980s.

AI is grabbing a random synthesis of what’s already popular online. It’s an echo chamber of TikTok, Instagram, and Trip Advisor.

This synthesis can be useful, I suppose, in a fast-paced world when a tourist doesn't have time for research, and the approach encourages the trend of the passive traveler who consumes pre-digested information rather than an active seeker who must evaluate, question, and synthesize.

I decided to test AI with one more question. I asked it for recommended artisan workshops to visit in Florence. It was able to name some, but it got addresses radically incorrect. Naming streets that don’t exist or saying that a bookbinder was in a location far from where it actually is. It also named artisan style shops more than actual workshops, and it did not mention the more “hidden” ones I take clients to.

Additionally, AI can’t (at least not yet) call these shops and make bookings, which we guides do when we are bringing clients.

During an artisan tour I led the other day, I was struck yet again by how special it is that these artisans are still carrying on traditions from centuries ago, some that developed in Florence in the 1500s, and the tools and methods created then are still used by today’s artisans.

Watching their quiet, methodical focus as they worked, I felt an enormous gap between where I was, and the big American retail chains I’d been in a few weeks ago in California. As trite as it sounds, one truly does step into another world in some of these workshops.

Luckily, many travelers still believe that an encounter with human expertise enriches their travel experience far more than AI can. In fact, I think some travelers are weary of algorithm-driven tourism even if they might not articulate it that way; they sense something is missing.

I can’t yet quantify what economic impact AI may have on guides and trip planners, but I can name what I offer that AI cannot: Graduate school training in Florentine Renaissance history, Italian language and cultural interpretation abilities, intimate knowledge of the city, real-time adaptability, the intangible quality of enthusiasm and storytelling, and curation born from lived experience.

In addition to the advent of AI, we also have the advent of “hit & run” tourism, which reduces a place like Florence to a series of checked-off items dictated by social media platforms. Stand in this hour-long line for a panino and then in that hour long line for an affogato.

I count myself lucky to have traveled across Europe and Asia long before social media drove travelers to focus on creating a viral video rather than on genuine discovery. In fact, “genuine discovery” is a term fundamentally altered by digital connectivity.

There will never again be travel like what I did in the 1980s in my early twenties. Discovery then was inevitable. A necessity. There was no alternative. We had to ask directions, had to trust instincts.

Modern travelers still discover things about themselves, but what’s lost in the digital world is geographic and logistical discovery. Travelers in the pre-digital world developed spatial intelligence. We built mental maps, we noticed how a city is organized, navigated by memory and observation, inhabiting space differently. The city and countries became legible in a way they do not when following a blue dot on a screen.

We tolerated ambiguity, accepting the discomfort of not knowing. We had to talk to strangers and make quick judgments about whom to trust. We developed self-reliance and problem-solving under uncertainty and we built a certain kind of immense confidence that came from being totally untethered from home.

From most countries I was in, calling home was nearly impossible. I would wait four hours in a dingy post office in India to make a call home, only to be told they couldn’t get it connected. Or, if the call did go through, it might just ring if my parents weren’t home—this was before answering machines!

After many months in out of the way places, I’d arrive in a major city like Jakarta and take a rickshaw to the American Express Office, eager for mail, only to be driven from pillar to post by the rickshaw driver who couldn’t find the office. I’d get out and wander into an empty building where he thought I might find the office. Rinse and repeat. When I did finally find it, I was told there was no mail for me. Not because no one had sent any, but because the office was unorganized.

A modern traveler having a hard time can call someone back home with a click of their finger and get a boost of support. If disoriented, they can get instant answers from Google Maps, telling them which bus or train to take. There’s no need to approach a stranger.

Almost all variables are controlled and modern travelers are not pushed in the same way to test their resourcefulness or to navigate by the use of intuition and observation.

Am I part of the first generation to have deeply lived in both worlds? When I think of those pre-digital age travels and then pull my mind back to the present reality, I experience a technological dissonance—a jarring discontinuity between two very different eras.

In Nepal and India when I was 21. Trekking before microfiber and fleece. All I had was a jean jacket, and my socks/pants/shirt were all cotton--not an appropriate fabric for high mountain hiking, but there was nothing else back then. On the right is a few months earlier when I rode a Bedford Army truck across India. Note, I'm wearing the same pair of pants.

No REI hiking shorts from nylon & spandex designed to be quick drying and breathable. No, when it was too warm for my one pair of pants, I wore a cotton skirt. I wore the heck out of that skirt--wore it across Asia daily for 6 months. Note the same shirt as in the Bedford Army truck photo. I also wore the heck out of that shirt. There's a hint of the jean jacket, padding me as I rest trailside. In the other photo where I've flopped down with local men and boys as if I belong, I've got on that same pair of pants, but I seem to have found an alternate shirt. I had no idea where I'd sleep each night. I just hoped to arrive in a village before dark. I slept on people's dirt floors and didn't bathe much, and somehow, I didn't notice.

In my early forties, twenty years after my first slow travels around the world, I chose to do a solo pilgrimage from northern Italy to Rome, adding another significant slow travel experience to my life. I did it with no smart phone, no GPS, no guide book, no lodging reservations and no portage of my pack by a hired company. I wasn't anxious about approaching it this way due to my years of travel abroad in the pre-digital age. And of course, Italy was very familiar to me and I spoke the language—it was certainly a tamer proposition than Nepal and other parts of Asia on my own at age twenty-one.

Today, the more I see hit & run tourism around me, the more I want to ramp up my promotion of slow travel.

And honestly, Italy, with its culture built on the art of savoring, is perfect for slow travel.

Who here is weary of algorithm-driven tourism?

Who would like to go deeper than a three-hour tour with me in Florence and really slow down and walk with me for two days plus an overnight on a beautiful part of the Via Francigena in Tuscany?

What slow travel experiences have you had? What does slow travel mean to you?

And if you’re of my generation, let me know if you relate to the technological dissonance!

More of my posts about overtourism, preserving cultural integrity, and slow travel

The problem with Starbucks in Italy

The Curious Case of Viral Sensations

Escaping Over Tourism on the Amalfi Coast

We Need to Talk About Overtourism: Florence, Venice, Rome

We Need to Talk About Overtourism: Cinque Terre

Get my book about my solo pilgrimage here