It took her on a “trip” to the “falls.”
Just in case we weren’t becoming overly reliant on Google Maps: A Polish tourist fell into a canal in Venice, Italy, after the ubiquitous navigation app allegedly led her astray, per an Instagram video going viral.
“When Google Maps says ‘go straight’ but you’re in Venice,” Wiktoria Guzenda captioned the clip of her epic “water fall.”
The accompanying clip shows the traveler walking down the stairs in the City of Canals while on her phone, when all of a sudden, she slips and falls in the water like a slapstick comedy movie.
It then cuts to Guzenda tending to some nasty scrapes on her leg that she sustained during her inadvertent “channel-surfing” moment.
Many viewers ridiculed the globe-trotter’s predicament, with one writing, “Soooo, what did she think would happen walking down stone steps into the water.”
Another mocked, “Maybe stop blindly following a gps and actually look around and use your brain.”
“You kinda just walked into this,” quipped a third.
Others were skeptical that it was a Google Maps issue at all. “She clearly slipped, she was probably just going to stop there on that step to take a photo lolololol,” theorized one commenter.
However, as many gawkers noted, Instagram feeds are filled with tales of people taking a spill into the Italian mecca’s labyrinthine waterways.
Meanwhile, Venice tour sites have noted that Google Maps is notoriously unreliable in the Floating City for a variety of reasons.
For one, Venice doesn’t use traditional street addresses like other cities, but rather employs a complex system called sestieri (districts) “with sequential numbering that can jump from building to building unpredictably,” Tour Leader Venice points out.
They also attributed the difficulty to the undetectable dead ends that are simply blocked by water, the app not recognizing the impassability of some bridges, and narrow passages that are treated like normal streets.
The app also doesn’t account for the constantly changing water levels, which can render certain routes temporarily impassable.
“Google Maps frequently directs tourists to routes that simply don’t exist or are blocked by canals,” Tour Leader Venice writes. “Many visitors find themselves standing at the edge of a canal with no bridge, exactly where Google Maps said they should turn.”
There are even whole threads on Facebook where tourists kvetch about the Odyssey-like experience of getting around Venice with GPS.
That’s why many travel sites recommend that people swap out Google Maps for a real tour guide, paper maps or Venice-specific navigations apps.
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