What Rick Steves Gets Wrong About Greece

Oh and also, what video travel's most seasoned everyman gets right

Remember when Frankie said Relax…Don’t Do it? Well, when your instinct for transactional travel kicks in, we say hey! Think twice. Before you book that cruise, before you let yourself be tempted by an organized tour, just, please, pull your head out of 1962. America is 250 years old, the world has moved on.

We are not just overtourism. We are over tourism. It was always a predatory industry — nothing against exploration, it’s just that travel ought to be defined by curiosity, not by cliches or TikTok. When it’s either of those things, you’re less a wanderer than a customer.

We actually like Rick Steves’ travel videos. The kind of breezy and actually informed narratives that are the common thread of his old vids are the antithesis of “influencer” slop, with all its vapid see-me-in-a-bikini with a selfie-stick schtick.

But make no mistake, Rick Steves like some others out there is not a travel writer of the Paul Theroux (who we’ve interviewed twice) or the late James Morris (who we met as Jan) school but a salesman. Behind the screenshot of everyman American affability there’s a business — of selling guidebooks, which we’ve done, and of selling travel, which we have not.

Nor will we.

It’s a not a model of travel that we much cotton to. Are there times and places when an organized tour makes sense? Of course. You want to rent a car and drive around South Africa or Burma on your own? Probably not. You want to brave the backstreets of Rio’s favelas sans guide? Good luck to ya.

But people, serve it: do you really need to hop on a beast of a tour bus or minivan in Spain or Italy? Yeah, probably not. Move that ass. Work that brain. Travel is travail. If you’re not doing the heavy lifting of your trip more or less on your own, you’re not really traveling. You just think you are.

Which brings us to Greece. As Rick says on his website, touting his new “Best of Athens & Nafplio in 8 Days” tour, Athens and Nafplio “are Greece's two best cities.”

Whoa. Let’s back up here for a minute and consider the cultural bias baked into that declaration. Imagine, for a moment, if a German or Frenchman told you, in earnest, that New York and Albuquerque are America’s two best cities.

One of them is. One is not.

Athens is Athens. Nafplio is Nafplio. Not using this space to debate the virtues of either, but the presumptuousness! Tell a Greek that Nafplio is somehow “better” than Thessaloniki, or Kalamata, or Chania, and see what happens (but we’re not going to help you, and our embassy probably isn’t either.)

But those Greeks probably aren’t trying to sell you a $3,295 tour (plus airfare). Rick Steves, bless him, is trying to make that sale.

Is it worth it? Possibly. Can you also see the best of Athens and Nafplio (a half-day is enough for Nafplio, and with a full day you can easily add Mycenae) for less and, if necessary, in less time? Hell to the Absolutely.

Going by Rick Steves’ pretty faultless reputation, we’ve no doubt his company puts together a good tour. It’s just that we find something sorta solipsistic and reductive about selling the idea that two places out of so many are the best, and that one person’s opinion should justify the expenditure of confirming (or not confirming) that opinion.

To be ecumenical about this, we also take issue with how most Americans cover travel in general. The New York Times recently plopped some Silicon Sally know-it-all into the Greek cap for 36 hours in order to Athensplain it to the masses, but their anodyne DEI scribe du jour knows zilch about Athens.

We know more.

We also know some folks for whom we would unreservedly recommend a Rick Steves tour of Greece, and we know some whose backs would stiffen and whose tongue would hiss at the very idea of climbing into a tour bus.

There is a middle ground, though.

Anybody who is smart enough to realize that our country is in a state of serious, probably irreversible decline is also smart enough to travel to a major European city like Athens and from there, decide what to do or where to go on their own, and for how long.

Places like Mycenae, ancient Nemea and slightly further afield Nafplio are super easy to get to by car — Greece isn’t Mexico, and the Greek road network is better than any of the sad crap we’ve seen on the East Coast (btw never book with an American company abroad, we say with a hiss; but do call our friends at Kosmos rental car) and if you don’t want to drive, there are day trips by bus and all of them are usually very good.

As for the endless platitudes that the cruise ship companies and well-meaning folks like Rick Steves peddle, come on girl. Every big city is “bustling”, see the “birthplace of democracy” but like everybody else does except the people who actually live there, proceed from one scripted experience to another, and pay down your credit card bill like a good American boy or girl once you’re safely back home. Tick that box bitch!

Travel doesn’t have to be dangerous. But did somebody say that it’s always got to be boring? Well, to be fair, there’s also Texas for that. Or — ugh — Portugal.