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Ghana Without Filters · Before you buy

One morning in October, over coffee, I found a brand-new Ghana travel guide for 2026–2027: 119 pages, a glossy cover, a promise of "insider tips" and "hidden gems".

Its subtitle invites you to relax at Labadi Beach. Its one and only review gives it one star and says the book talks about restaurants in Singapore. I laughed. Then I clicked on the author's name, and stopped laughing.

What the cover promises

The title alone is a small masterpiece of search-engine poetry: Ghana Travel Guide 2026–2027: The Ultimate Guide for First-Time Visitors to Accra, Cape Coast and Kumasi – Discover Cape Coast Castle and Elmina… relax at Labadi Beach. There is a hardcover, a paperback, an author's name and a translator's name. The listing does not say who the author is, or where he has travelled in Ghana.

The blurb is the kind you have read a hundred times: "Are you planning a trip to Ghana and looking for a reliable, practical and easy-to-understand travel guide?" It promises to accompany you "step by step through every phase of your journey". It could describe any country on earth.

Relax at Labadi Beach. Really?

Anyone who has followed Accra's news in 2026 knows what happened at Labadi: demolitions along the beachfront that changed the place most visitors knew. A guide written this year by someone who had been there, or had even read a newspaper, would at least warn you. This one puts Labadi in its title as a place to relax.

For what Labadi and Accra's beaches actually look like now, read our honest guide to Greater Accra's beaches and the December 2026 guide.

Then I clicked on the author

The author's page on Amazon has a name and a grey placeholder silhouette. That is all. There is no biography, no photograph and no word about who he is, where he has travelled, or why anyone should trust him on any country at all.

Below it, under "All Books", the English titles alone add up to eight travel guides. Almost all are for "2026–2027", all have the same glossy cover style, and all are hardcovers at around 22 to 26 euros:

• Glacier National Park, USA
• Corfu, Greece
• The Louvre Museum, Paris
• Bhutan
• Vatican City
• Ghana
• Mozambique
• Umbria, Italy

The same books then appear again in German and other languages, which is why the author's page shows far more than eight editions. And one title, for Bhutan, promises to be "The Most Complete First space Timer's…" guide. "First space Timer". Nobody, it seems, ever read the cover.

How Amazon lets it through

Amazon does not ban books written by artificial intelligence. Since September 2023, self-publishers on its Kindle platform have had to tell Amazon when a book's text, images or translations were generated by AI. But Amazon has never made clear how it checks those answers, and as far as is publicly known, buyers looking at the product page are not shown them.

Amazon's main brake on the flood of such books is a limit of three new titles per day per account. Three a day is more than a thousand books a year.

In my opinion, this is not publishing. It is a business model that lives on the trust of travellers who cannot yet know what they are buying, and on platforms that profit from every sale whether the book is true or not.

Why this matters more for Ghana than for Paris

A bad guide to Paris costs you a disappointing dinner. A bad guide to Ghana can cost you far more. It can send you to a beach with deadly rip currents, to a museum that has been closed for months, to a fort you cannot enter, or through the wrong visa process. Since 25 May 2026 every visitor must apply online before flying, and a book printed earlier simply gets it wrong. Our ETA and e-Visa page has the current rules.

It can also leave you with prices from five years ago in a country where the cedi has moved dramatically. And for many diaspora visitors this is not a holiday. It is a journey they have saved and dreamed of for years. For them, read Why the African Diaspora Should Visit Ghana in 2027.

How to spot a machine-made travel book

A confession, and the real difference

I use digital tools too. Every serious publisher does now. The difference is not the tool. It is whether someone who has actually been there checks every sentence, takes the photographs, and corrects mistakes when readers point them out.

Ghana-Net.com has been online since December 2000. It covers one country, and the neighbours that share its history, not the whole world. The photographs on our pages are my own, taken over more than twenty-five years in Ghana. When a site closes, we say so. When we get something wrong, we fix it and say that too. And everything is free to read, with no 119-page paperback required. Why I chose a living website over a book is explained in Why You Don't Need Another Ghana Travel Book.

Start here instead

• The Complete Guide to Ghana: visas, money, transport and what nobody tells you
• Accra, Cape Coast and Kumasi: the three cities the guide's title promises, honestly reviewed
• Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle: the two castles on the book's cover, on their own dedicated sites
• Ghana ETA and e-Visa: the 2026 rules, kept up to date
• The real cost of travelling in Ghana
• The Biggest Lies Influencers Tell About Ghana

Sources: Book title, listing, author page and review as shown on Amazon.de on 16 October 2026. The review is quoted in Amazon's own English translation, with the reviewer's name removed. Amazon's AI disclosure rules and the three-titles-a-day limit as reported by the Authors Guild, the Alliance of Independent Authors and The Guardian (2023). We have not bought the book, and judge it only by its listing, its sample, its author page and its published review.

Written by Remo Kurka, Ghana-Net.com · Amazon listing checked: 16 October 2026 · Updated and fact-checked: 5 November 2026