I’ve been home so long, and gotten all domesticated and out of the loop, you probably forgot I’m a guidebook author. I think I did for a little while.

But I just read a post on Killing Batteries, a blog by a fellow LP author, Leif Pettersen: Don’t leave home without your Lonely Planet.

He’s addressing the trend among bad-ass backpackers to chuck the guidebook and tramp around on instinct alone. And usually be arrogant, more-authentic-than-thou assholes about it in the process.

As much as I’d like to keep myself in business, I’ve got to say that you can get by without a guidebook if you’ve got enough travel experience.

I mean, after a certain point, you can certainly discern how a city–any city–is structured, and guess where the cool bars are, and where the grand museum will be, and how the buses work. As long as you don’t care all that much about hitting The Big Sights (I never do), you will have a fine visit that is uniquely yours.

Honestly, the more I write travel guides, the more I’m crushed by the sheer volume of useless information that’s piled into them. All I really need to know before I visit a city is how to get from the airport to downtown, the name of an authoritative food blog, the name of one coolish neighborhood and an idea where the ‘bad’ neighborhoods are, and whether they’re interesting to visit, or too dangerous. Also, a lead on where to rent a bicycle helps.

But then again, maybe that’s why I write travel guides. It sounds jaded and mercenary, but I feel pretty confident I can pretty show up in a city and within a couple of days get to the root of what makes it interesting. Then again, it’s not due to my guidebook-author superpowers of perception–it’s because cool/arty/offbeat culture is now almost the same and easily recognizable anywhere in the world. And also because I’ve done a lot of research beforehand.

Of course I’m talking only about city guides. Country and regional guides are a different beast, and they often have invaluable logistical information. But because book publishing is a glacial business, even that can be not so useful. I’ve typed up so many bus schedules just to satisfy a guidebook template, all the while knowing that the bus schedule will have only a small relation to reality by the time the book is published.

The non-guidebook-users are often better off, because they just get up and walk to the bus station to see what’s going on. Book devotees may just sit around their hotel room, making their plans…only to find them dashed once they show up at the station with all their luggage.

Leif does make some excellent points about hotel and restaurant reviews. And even though I too think hotel reviews are rapidly becoming a waste of space in guidebooks, I am proud of the fact that I am one of the few people who has ever visited just about every low-end hotel in Cairo. I am uniquely qualified to tell you which one is worth the money, and which will give you a disease. Unfortunately, in the process of visiting every hotel in Cairo, I didn’t make any amazing discoveries–it turns out that my judgment correlated pretty well with TripAdvisor reviews. But at least my reviews were more succinct and clever.

As for restaurants, I care deeply. A trip with bad food is a failed trip, in my opinion. So I’m going to bust ass to find the best restaurants. And Leif makes an excellent point: non-guidebook-users pride themselves on asking locals for recommendations. But that’s exactly what guidebook authors do.

But I don’t just take the taxi driver’s or hotel receptionist’s or drunk bar-goer’s word. Half those people have terrible taste in food, or just automatically recommend the famous-but-now-crappy place because you’ve put them on the spot. But if you’re a starving traveler, you may not have the time or judgment to decide whether this “local advice” is really all it’s cracked up to be.

What luck, though–I have vetted these locals’ recommendations! I have dined at the filthy, the bland, the rip-off restaurants…so you don’t have to. And they’re not in the guidebook for a good reason.

As a guidebook author, I’m a distiller of information. Sometimes what I write will be outdated before it even goes to print. Sometimes I’ll highlight a fantastic place, and then it will get overrun by annoying fellow travelers. These things happen. But I’ve also done an epic amount of research–online and on the ground–so maybe I can spare the random traveler from wasting a lot of hours on TripAdvisor, at the very least.

But perhaps the most valuable function of a guidebook is the very one that these go-it-alone travel bad-asses dislike: a guidebook is a security blanket. In a good way. It can arm you with enough knowledge to make you feel a little bit safer, and a little less paranoid.

Perhaps the best thing a guidebook can tell you is when and in what context you can trust the locals. The answer, everywhere, is 99 percent of the time. But a guidebook can help you get oriented, and tell you that even though the first ten people who’ve talked to you are sleazy, not everyone in the city is. (That’s what I feel like I spent half my Cairo chapter talking about.)

If you can walk a little more easily in the street because of this, and feel freer to speak to the locals you do deem trustworthy, you’ll have a much better trip. And that alone makes a guidebook purchase worthwhile.

But I won’t blame you if you wind up leaving the book in your hotel, and wandering around lost, and eating in a random corner restaurant you stumble across. That’s really what you should do. Trust your instincts–and if a guidebook can help you train those instincts, so much the better.