Notes from a selfie island: Why you shouldn't let AI choose your holiday
Google Bard sent us to Santorini and here's what we learnt
“The world is your oyster,” travel companies like to tell us. As someone who feels nauseous at the scope for error when picking a place to go on holiday, the phrase is not encouraging. The vast majority of oysters do not contain a pearl, and I’m not from the kind of background to have a taste for the sloppy flesh of the pearl-less.1
That said, my dad did once splash out on a big seafood hamper containing a few of the supposed delicacies - scabby, rock-like things that he chiselled open with hammer and screwdriver. I must have been about 12 at the time, and I still remember my visceral revulsion on gulping down that slimy, briny mouthful, gasping: “Eurgh! It tastes like Newhaven beach!”
The world is my oyster? Fine, I’ll try anything twice. Dimly aware that the phrase was coined by Shakespeare, it seemed fittingly fatalistic, when Google hastily launched its AI chat service earlier this year, to let Bard choose a spring holiday destination for my partner Anton and me.
Freshly signed up, I posed the question: Where would be a nice place to go on holiday in Europe in late April that offers both beach, warm temperatures and access to countryside? We would be getting around on foot and bicycle rather than car
I can’t remember word for word Bard’s answer - tellingly, it saves only your questions, not its answers - but it listed three places: southern Portugal, Mallorca and Santorini. The first two I could’ve conjured up off the top of my head, so dismissed them out of hand for unoriginality, but Santorini I knew nothing about it. Two clicks later I’d learnt that the whole island is essentially a collapsed volcano formed by one of the biggest eruptions ever, in around 1500 BCE, wiping out an entire civilisation. Wow, my kind of place.
Looking back at my Bard chat history, I asked four follow-up questions:
How much does it cost to fly to Santorini from Gatwick?
Any famous news stories about Santorini?
What are the risks of a natural disaster occurring on Santorini if I stay there for one week?
Is Santorini a good place for cycling?
Duly satisfied that I was more likely to die in a plane crash (the risk of which was compensated by the ridiculously low price of the EasyJet fare) than a natural disaster, and that Santorini was a good place for cycling, the decision was made - or rather outsourced to AI.
It felt liberating and exciting to be going somewhere I knew so little about and which had been suggested not by a partial, limited human mind but something describing itself as an “experimental, conversational” service. Tomorrow’s world was beckoning, and we didn’t need to trust it or understand it, we just needed to go with it.
On Airbnb I found an affordable villa in the south of the island described as “house in vineyard”, which looked almost reminiscent of a bucolic place we had stayed in Croatia, and was reasonably priced at €65 a night. With the flights booked in just a few more clicks, that was it: Santorini here we come!
Our first inkling that Bard had led us astray came just moments before the plane began its descent towards - or “into” as pilots are wont of saying - the island. In an act tantamount to aural terrorism, a middle-aged holidaymaker seized control of the plane’s PA system to deliver a saccharine tribute to her “hubby”. They were visiting Santorini for their 20th wedding anniversary, she gushed to her captive if not captivated audience, before inflicting on us a script that sounded like it was plagiarised from a greetings card, signing off to relieved applause with “from your Sweet Wife”. When I’d booked the time off work, my boss had mentioned, in the same I’m-telling-you-this-for-your-own-good tone he uses for editorial corrections, that Santorini was “very popular among honeymooners”, but I hadn’t paid much attention, presuming he was just making conversation.
Our taxi from the airport was driven by a big, friendly-but-concise man who told us that he was originally from Serbia and moved to the island 20 years ago. Had this place changed a lot over that time? “Yes, very much.” As he sped on wordlessly over the mountain heading south from the airport, the traffic remained ominously heavy. One long stream of cars, trucks, bikes and ATVs, in both directions, with the helmet-less moped rider ahead of us performing one-handed wheelies with nihilistic abandon. My first impression of the island, then, was not so much paradise as a scene from Mad Max. When I mentioned to our taxi driver our intention to hire bicycles, he fell silent for a long, pregnant pause. “On bikes you take care,” he pronounced gravely. “That is all I say.”
This is not a hatchet job on Santorini. Over-tourism needs no help with that. Seriously though, my point, for what it’s worth, is that you can’t trust AI to choose your holiday destination.
Our accommodation ticked all the boxes, having as it did a roof, a coffee maker, and being close to the seafront, an apparently endless strip of bars and restaurants. Getting there involved a slightly terrifying 10-minute walk along a lane-sized road with trunk road levels of traffic despite our being almost as far as it was possible to be away from the island’s main towns, in what I’d imagined as the ‘sleepy south’. Almost all the roads on Santorini are narrow and pavement-less. For an island that is only about 10 miles long and four miles wide, the volume of traffic is extraordinary, and as lorry wing-mirrors scud past within millimetres of your earlobes, you realise, arguably too late, that the island’s infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with its tourism.
The briefest bout of analogue-intelligence-gathering before booking would have alerted me to the fact that Santorini suffers severely from over-tourism. Millions of visitors crowd onto the tiny island every year, and frankly, peak season must be hellish. Even puff pieces about luxury hotels admit that the island is “failing the stress test”. Vogue visited in 2020 and in unabashed come, Armageddon, come spirit asked, “Can Coronavirus Cure Santorini Of Over-Tourism For Good?”
The over-popularity seems to have been caused, or at least catalysed, by the highly Instagrammable nature the view over the caldera, particularly at sunset, from the main towns Fira and Oia. Why anyone would want to crowd onto the terraces of absurdly overpriced bars to photograph a scene that has been captured billions of times by others is beyond me, but there is no escaping the wasps-to-jam-jar effect. What would it take for the vista to lose its sticky allure?
We still had a good time on Santorini. Off the hectic paved roads, the island is crisscrossed by dirt roads, and we enjoyed trekking through the countryside despite the occasional convey of tourist ATVs roaring past. And we particularly enjoyed hiking up into the mountains from Perissa to Ancient Thera, the original capital founded by Spartans in the 9th Century BCE and excavated in the late 19th Century. God (or indeed gods) knows what those ancients would make of the island’s wholly unSpartan ‘culture’ today.
We didn’t hire bikes in the end, as none were available at our local rental place, which was probably a blessing given the traffic.
On our last day, our Airbnb host invited us to look around the cellar beneath the house, which had been used by generations of his family for small-scale wine production. Old photographs, oak barrels and grape-pressing apparatus made me ponder how locals who once made a living from such cottage industries have adapted to the tourist boom. “It has gone crazy since maybe 2012,” said our host dolefully. “Too much. Many people have got rich very quickly and it has changed how we relate to one another. Before, if you saw someone working in the fields, you would stop and chat, maybe go in for a drink. That doesn’t happen anymore. We’re more isolated, and it’s even worse since Covid.”
We won’t go back to Santorini, at least not until it’s had a few decades to cool off. And we’ll never again trust Bard or ChatGPT or any other AI to choose our holiday. Where next? Maybe we’ll go back to that languid, nondescript bit of mid-France we went last year. Anyway, it turns out that the real bard Shakespeare is being misquoted when holiday-hawkers chirp “the world is your oyster” – it’s not your but mine, “the world’s mine oyster”. The line occurs in The Merry Wives of Windsor as an avaricious retort from a bluffing coward to a con-man.
Falstaff: I will not lend thee a penny.
Pistol: Why then the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.
Falstaff: Not a penny.
True to the original meaning, the pearl of the Aegean has been taken by force.