The Tyranny of the TripAdvisor Review: Finding the Sublime in Unscheduled Silence

Somewhere between the airport Wi-Fi login screen and the fifth tab of “Top 27 Things You Must Not Miss,” I realized I was no longer planning a trip.
I was auditioning for one.

Not for myself, of course.
For the invisible jury of reviewers and list-makers, the crowd of “must-do” whisperers who always seem to know better. They sit on my shoulder as I choose hotels. They hover over my dinner menu. They turn a simple walk into a checklist of “experiences.” And if I’m not careful, they decide the shape of my memories before I’ve even lived them.

It’s funny how quickly it happens. You open the app just to “double-check,” and suddenly you’re chasing stars, rankings, reassurance. Every option becomes a referendum on your competence as a traveler. Did you choose correctly? Are you missing the better view, the hidden gem, the dish described as “life-changing”?

Life-changing.
The bar is impossibly high these days.

Travel isn’t a pilgrimage anymore; it’s performance art.

On my second morning in a small coastal town in Portugal, I had planned — or rather, TripAdvisor had planned for me — a sunrise viewpoint famous for transforming the sky into “a watercolor masterpiece.” Thousands of reviews swore I’d cry.

I overslept.

Not gracefully. The kind of oversleep where you wake with that specific jolt reserved for missed alarms and imminent doom. I threw on yesterday’s clothes and ran toward the hilltop, heart pounding, half hoping the sun would wait for me out of pity.

It didn’t.

By the time I reached the top, the famous glow had already dissolved into full daylight. A couple of dedicated early risers were packing up their tripods. A man with a drone tilted his head toward me — sympathetically, I thought — as if to say, “Tough luck, friend.”

I sat anyway. Out of breath. Mildly defeated. A little embarrassed.

And then — without fanfare or filter — the town exhaled beneath me. Shop shutters rolled open. A bread truck rattled down a cobblestone alley. Someone’s radio drifted through their kitchen window. It wasn’t a watercolor masterpiece. It was morning. A plain, ordinary morning.

But it was mine.

Sitting there, sweating through my T-shirt and chewing on a half-crushed pastry from my pocket, I felt a quiet click inside. The kind you only notice when everything else stops clamoring for your attention.

I didn’t get the sunrise.
I got something better: silence.
The unreviewed kind.

The trouble with rating systems is that they trick us into equating consensus with meaning.

Five stars often means popular, not profound.
Three stars sometimes means misunderstood.
And one star — my personal favorite — often means the reviewer got rained on and decided the entire cathedral/monument/restaurant was a disappointment.

We think we’re searching for “the best,” but what we’re really searching for is certainty. We want to ensure the money, the time, the effort weren’t wasted.

But certainty is travel’s most effective anesthetic.
It numbs you before wonder ever has a chance.

Some of my most memorable travel moments have been the ones no one recommended: a tiny laundromat in Kyoto where an elderly woman insisted I try her homemade pickles. A bus ride in Guatemala where the driver played the same love song on repeat until the entire bus — tourist and local alike — hummed along with resigned affection. A thunderstorm in Seville that flooded the plaza and turned it into an impromptu wading pool for laughing children.

Try reviewing that.
Try optimizing for it.

There’s a kind of holiness in the uncurated. The moments that arrive without being scheduled or photographed or bragged about.

Maybe it’s sacred because it’s fleeting.
Maybe it’s sacred because it asks nothing of us.
Maybe it's sacred because, for once, we’re not trying to prove anything.

When I think back on that Portuguese hilltop, I don’t remember the reviews or the view I “missed.” I remember how the morning felt sitting inside my ribs — warm, quiet, slightly salty from the sea. Ordinary in the best way.

And I wonder how many moments like that I’ve bulldozed in my quest for the best-rated version of reality.

So here’s my small act of defiance, my tiny protest against the tyranny of perfect planning:

I’ve started scheduling pockets of silence into my trips.

Not as activities. Not as “mindfulness sessions.”
Just… gaps. Blank spaces. Little breathing rooms where nothing is required, and everything is allowed.

Sometimes I fill them with a slow walk.
Sometimes with people-watching.
Sometimes with a nap.

And sometimes, if I’m lucky, the world meets me halfway and hands me something quietly luminous — a moment with no stars but all the wonder.

If that makes me a worse traveler according to the apps, I’m willing to take the hit.

Because I’m learning that the soul of a place rarely lives in its superlatives.
It lives in the unreviewed corners — the unscripted pauses — the unscheduled silence we’re brave enough to sit inside.

And maybe that’s the whole point.

If you always chase the “can’t-miss,” you’ll miss everything you can’t plan.