Lonely Planet and the Rapid Decline of Printed Travel Guidebooks

For the whole enchilada, click the Skift link below.

Jason Clampet on the Rapid Decline of Travel Guidebooks

Unpaid Internships are a Scam

Travel is actually NOT a Waste of Time

Unpaid Internships are a Scam via Slate

Wednesday's conversation about writing for free on the Internet naturally segued into the hot topic of unpaid internships. One aspect of this that's often important in D.C. is unpaid internships at mission-driven nonprofits. If you're running a mission-driven nonprofit, then obviously you have to ask yourself what your mission is. If you think your mission includes promoting upward economic mobility and an economically and ethnically diverse talent pipeline, then obviously part of your expenditure profile should be making sure that people who can't afford to spend their summers mooching off their parents can get a shot at the valuable experience your internship program offers.

This—like the question of whether your internship program actually is a valuable experience—is really a question of whether you want to live up to your mission. When it comes to greedy for-profit firms, obviously the goal is to get useful work out of people for as little money as possible, and thus you have a different issue. And the relevant analytical issue is to ask what do unpaid internships crowd out? To a lot of people, it seems to go without saying that they crowd out paid labor, but that's not clear to me. In my industry, for example, there are no formal credentialing requirements, but in practice just about everyone has a bachelor's degree. What's interesting is that some people also have a master's degree.

Spending a year as an unpaid intern sounds like a financially unattractive option. But spending nine months getting a master's from Columbia Journalism School costs $53,346. So you have one firm that's cynically offering you the chance to provide a year's worth of free labor in exchange for valuable learning and connections, and you have another firm that's cynically offering you the chance to provide More than $50,000 in exchange for valuable learning and connections. It's at least not obvious to me that the zero-salary option makes less sense than the negative-salary option. Now the real-world issue here is that financing options are relevant.

If you actually have $50,000 in the bank, then I think it's a no-brainer. You set $25,000 aside as savings to make a down payment on a house someday, and you work for free for a year spending down your $25,000. If at the end of the year you get a paying gig, good for you! If you don't, then you go into some other line of work. But who has $50,000 in the bank? The government will help make sure you can get a loan if you spend it on graduate school but not if the issue is that you just need to eat. So it's not just that young people from privileged backgrounds have access to potentially more attractive career opportunities—they have access to them on a more attractive financial basis. If college were free (so people exited with no debt) and everyone got a $50,000 graduation present for finishing, my bet is that we'd see more internships and fewer graduate schools.

Financial Times The End of the Travel Guidebook

Chuck Thompson Asks the Big Question

Financial Times on the End of the Travel Guidebook, circa 2010

Outside the Tate I stand on the Millennium Bridge, holding up the phone and surveying the view on its screen, as if looking through the viewfinder of a camera. As I slowly pan around, different arrows pop up above the buildings, showing me the nearest and best hotels, restaurants, pubs, nightclubs, post offices, or whatever else I choose to look for. I decide to seek out a hotel, pick one that the phone tells me is 800 yards away, and am shown reviews from other websites plus rates and availability. All of which seems fine, so I hit another button and the phone’s sat-nav brings up an interactive map to take me there. Oh yes – and all this is free. So why would you ever need a guidebook?

“The publishing world has been talking for years about how we are going to follow the music industry down the pan,” says Mark Ellingham, founder of the Rough Guides series, which has sold more than 30m books worldwide.“I don’t think that is going to happen tremendously quickly for publishing in general, but travel guidebooks are absolutely the front line. In travel it makes much more sense to have digital rather than traditional paper books.” And the latest news from the front line is not good. In fact, over the past two and a half years, guidebook sales in Britain have fallen off a cliff.

Sales for 2009 were down 18 per cent on 2007, and if the second half of this year follows the first, 2010 will be down 27 per cent on 2007, according to data from Nielsen BookScan. If the current rate of decline continues, the final guidebook will be sold in less than seven years’ time. Lonely Planet’s Australia guide sold 20,015 copies in 2008, and just 13,530 in 2009 – a drop of a third (again, the figures are from Nielsen BookScan, covering sales from British retailers). The Rough Guide to France, which sold 11,943 in 2008, fell 45 per cent to 6,561 the following year. Worse is that these are considered bestsellers.

Of course, the fortunes of individual titles fluctuate with the launch of new editions and the fashionability of destinations, but average sales across the whole range paint an equally bleak picture. Last year, the average UK sale of each title from the leading five publishers was around 1,500 copies. The reasons behind this sales collapse are all too apparent – a combination of new technology and recession. Fewer people are travelling so buy fewer guidebooks, while those that do still go away are more likely to download free information online rather than spending money on a book.

Perhaps it didn’t help that the recession and drop in tourism coincided with a whistleblowing account revealing the short-cuts undertaken by some travel writers – such as not actually bothering to visit the country they are writing about. In Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? published in April 2008, Thomas Kohnstamm, a Lonely Planet freelancer, detailed how he had sold drugs to make ends meet as he researched a guide to Brazil, taken freebies in return for positive coverage and recommended a restaurant at which a waitress had invited him to return for sex on a table after closing time. The guidebook later noted that the restaurant “is a pleasant surprise ... and the table service is friendly”.

Kohnstamm also said he had written chunks of a book on Colombia while living in San Francisco: “I got the information from a chick I was dating – an intern in the Colombian consulate.” Lonely Planet quickly dismissed Kohnstamm as a lone bad apple and said his work had been checked by other authors. But the story spawned hundreds of newspaper pieces and a spotlight had been shone on guidebook writing in general. Other authors confessed to “desk researching” countries rather than visiting them, or complained that poor pay was making it impossible to maintain standards. The halo had slipped, but far more damaging was the fact that people were getting increasingly used to finding their own information online.

It dawned on travellers that guidebooks didn’t have a monopoly on information, that their own research from the internet might even be better. And it would certainly be more up-to-date. “Publishers are asking themselves how much of the fall in sales is a result of the recession, and how long the recession will go on, but the even bigger question is will people go back to the same buying habits as they had pre-recession, or will they have found other ways of finding information?” says Stephen Mesquita, the former managing director of AA Publishing and now an industry analyst and author of the Nielsen BookScan Travel Publishing Year Book.

Mesquita suggests there’s already some evidence hinting that younger people in particular are shifting their habits. Sales of books to Australia and New Zealand, traditional gap-year destinations, have fallen faster than the number of visitors to those countries, presumably because young travellers are happy to stop at internet cafés, researching their trips as they go. “The challenge for travel publishers is re-inventing their business model, but because of the recession, they are having to do it far quicker than they probably thought they would have to,” Mesquita says.

Already one publisher has decided it will cease printing books altogether. Since its launch in 2001 Nota Bene has produced beautifully illustrated guides to some 50 different destinations, distributing them to its 5,000 subscribers, but it is relaunching this month, and will henceforth publish only in digital form, via the iPad. “I agonised for a long, long time about dispensing with the books because people absolutely loved them,” says Anthony Lassman, Nota Bene’s founder. “We started looking into building a website, but then the iPad came along and everything suddenly made sense.”

Sales figures may be dire, the challenges mounting, but this summer there’s a buzz in the world of travel publishing, a sense of being on the verge of a totally new era. The internet allowed people to research their trips themselves before setting out, but smartphone apps and iPads travel with them. Suddenly the guidebook publishers, who for years seemed to be looking on from the sidelines, unsure of how to make websites work for them, have found themselves with a medium that makes sense. “I could see that if you got in early and created the most compelling products then it could be fantastically lucrative as well,” says Douglas Schatz, who last year gave up his job as boss of Stanfords, the venerable London travel book shop, to become Lonely Planet’s managing director for Europe, Middle East and Asia.

Remember those guidebook sales figures? The average title selling just 1,500 copies a year? Compare that with the fact that during the volcanic ash crisis, 4.2m Lonely Planet apps covering 13 destinations were downloaded within four days. Admittedly they were being given away as a free promotion to help stranded passengers, but it hints at the potential. Selling apps online also lets publishers cut out conventional retailers, who have been squeezing margins aggressively and often dictated at what price a book will be sold.

Of course, over the past couple of years have seen many travel-related apps, some from airlines, hotels and others in the travel industry; others as extensions of travel websites, and lots of them free. But this summer publishers are piling into the app market, hoping to persuade customers that it’s worth paying for an app that comes with the guidebook brand’s trusted tone and voice. Last month Ellingham, who sold Rough Guides in 2008, launched Cool Places, a series of 30 slick apps to UK destinations, including St Ives, Brighton and Whitby. In June, Footprint Travel Guides released its first apps, with 50 being rolled out by the end of this month. Rough Guides’ new apps debut later this year, and last week Lonely Planet launched its new Compass app – the first augmented reality app from a mainstream guidebook publisher. Their jostling for position is given extra impetus by the assumption that the market will explode as mobile roaming charges fall.

So will the printed guidebook disappear altogether? One scenario sees print becoming the preserve of photo-led “inspiration” books, for armchair reading before you go away. But even that market could be squeezed by the iPad. Lonely Planet, for example, recently released 1,000 Ultimate Experiences, an innovative iPad book for pre-travel inspiration that mixes photos, text and video. Another theory is that books will become niche products covering special interests or remote, developing destinations without mobile coverage or the visitor numbers to merit an app. Bradt – known for its guides to almost comically uncommercial destinations, including North Korea and Iraq – actually saw sales rise by 2.25 per cent in 2009. And one of the few real success stories of recent years has been Punk Publishing, which produces the Cool Camping and Wild Swimming series, and saw sales double in the last four years.

Jonathan Knight, founder of Punk Publishing, a partner with Ellingham in the Cool Places apps, says it’s vital to find a niche. “Our most mainstream title to date was Taste Britain, all about the best farmers markets, wonderful delis and so on. You’d think that would have wide appeal, but it’s actually been our worst-selling book.” Even those driving the digital change get a little misty-eyed about books. Everyone I spoke to stressed their love of print – everything from the portability of books to the smell of the pages. What a tragedy it would be, they all said, if guidebooks did disappear. But would it really? Perhaps being less devoted to them might actually improve our travel experience. The new technology requires far more active involvement on the user’s part. You have to seek out information from an app. You use Google Googles to give information on something that has spontaneously caught your eye. So perhaps the death of the guidebook might at last teach us, just like Lucy Honeychurch, to experience foreign countries for ourselves. If not, then at least the new technology will, according to Ellingham, “make it an awful lot easier to find a good pub.”

Tom Robbins is the FT’s travel editor. Over the course of last year I saw the guidebook industry switch to digital, first-hand and in real-time, writes Dan Linstead. In January, I had the idea of an accommodation guide for travellers who enjoy staying with local people. I’d visited homestays from India to New Zealand, and marvelled at the welcome, cultural insight and value they offer. In Rajasthan, for example, I’d spent luxurious nights with an aristocratic family who overwhelmed me with home-cooked curries and Raj-era photographs – all for £30 a night. No guide to these authentic, affordable places to stay exists. I envisaged a book capturing the post-crunch zeitgeist in the way Hip Hotels did for more indulgent times.

Fired with enthusiasm, I approached travel publisher A, producer of a bestselling recent series. Their reply set a tone that was to become familiar: “I can see this being a beautiful book and a truly original concept for a travel guide. [But] it’s an idea that lends itself much more to online than print.” Convinced that the right format was a book, I went to publisher B. They praised my “fantastic sample pages” but were “seeing a big drop-off in accommodation guides”, and suggested it would make a “great online resource”. With publisher C, though – a household name – I finally found a kindred spirit. The proposal went down well. Over several months, meetings took place; an editor was appointed; chapters sketched out. But then, on the brink of the deal, a new head honcho joined the firm, and all went ominously quiet. The eventual rejection email, like its predecessors, praised my idea as “a unique proposal” but admitted they were “not convinced that its ideal manifestation is as a book”.

I tried one more time, with publisher D, but was frankly unsurprised when a flurry of enthusiasm gave way to the announcement that “we’ve decided to invest our limited resources into development of our digital products”. Guidebook publishers, it seemed, were desperate to avoid publishing any actual books. They all seemed delighted with the originality of my idea, but wanted it digital, downloadable, direct. Anything but print. But there was a happy ending, of sorts. Last week, one of the founding fathers of UK guidebooks, a bookish kind of fellow, approached me. Would I like to write a guide for his new series, he wondered, about my home town of Windsor? He reached into his briefcase to show me the first few titles, and produced, with a flourish, the medium for his new endeavour. An iPhone.

Nate Thayer on Writing Web Posts for Free

Web Writing for Low Wages is like Luggage Meltdown

Nate Thayer Says Fuck You to The Atlantic

A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013

Here is an exchange between the Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine and myself this afternoon attempting to solicit my professional services for an article they sought to publish after reading my story “25 Years of Slam Dunk Diplomacy: Rodman trip comes after 25 years of basketball diplomacy between U.S. and North Korea”

On Mar 4, 2013 3:27 PM, “olga khazan” wrote: Hi there — I’m the global editor for the Atlantic, and I’m trying to reach Nate Thayer to see if he’d be interested in repurposing his recent basketball diplomacy post on our site. Could someone connect me with him, please? thanks, Olga Khazan okhazan@theatlantic.com

From the head of NK News, who originally published the piece this morning: Hi that piece is copy right to NK News, so please engage us mutually. Thanks, tad From the Atlantic:

Sure. Thanks Nate and Tad…I was just wondering if you’d be interested in adapting a version of that for the Atlantic. Let me know if you’d be interested. thanks, Olga From me: Hi Olga: Give me a shout at 443 205 9162 in D.C. and I’d be delighted to see whether we can work something out. Best, Nate Thayer

From the Atlantic: Sure, I’ll call you in a few minutes. After a brief phone call where no specifics were really discussed, and she requested I email her: Hi Olga: What did you have in mind for length, storyline, deadline, and fees for the basketball diplomacy piece. Or any other specifics. I think we can work something out, but I want to make sure I have the time to do it properly to meet your deadline, so give me a shout back when you have the earliest chance. best, Nate Thayer

From the Atlantic: Thanks for responding. Maybe by the end of the week? 1,200 words? We unfortunately can’t pay you for it, but we do reach 13 million readers a month. I understand if that’s not a workable arrangement for you, I just wanted to see if you were interested. Thanks so much again for your time. A great piece!

From me: Thanks Olga: I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children. I know several people who write for the Atlantic who of course get paid. I appreciate your interest, but, while I respect the Atlantic, and have several friends who write for it, I have bills to pay and cannot expect to do so by giving my work away for free to a for profit company so they can make money off of my efforts. 1200 words by the end of the week would be fine, and I can assure you it would be well received, but not for free. Frankly, I will refrain from being insulted and am perplexed how one can expect to try to retain quality professional services without compensating for them. Let me know if you have perhaps mispoken. best, Nate

From the Atlantic: Hi Nate — I completely understand your position, but our rate even for original, reported stories is $100. I am out of freelance money right now, I enjoyed your post, and I thought you’d be willing to summarize it for posting for a wider audience without doing any additional legwork. Some journalists use our platform as a way to gain more exposure for whatever professional goals they might have, but that’s not right for everyone and it’s of course perfectly reasonable to decline. Thank you and I’m sorry to have offended you. Best, Olga

From me: Hi Olga: No offense taken and no worries. I am sure you are aware of the changing, deteriorating condition of our profession and the difficulty for serious journalists to make a living through their work resulting in the decline of the quality of news in general. Ironically, a few years back I was offered a staff job with the Atlantic to write 6 articles a year for a retainer of $125,000, with the right to publish elsewhere in addition. The then editor, Michael Kelly, was killed while we were both in Iraq, and we both, as it were, moved on to different places. I don’t have a problem with exposure but I do with paying my bills.

I am sure you can do what is the common practice these days and just have one of your interns rewrite the story as it was published elsewhere, but hopefully stating that is how the information was acquired. If you ever are interested in a quality story on North Korea and wiling to pay for it, please do give me a shout. I do enjoy reading what you put out, although I remain befuddled as to how that particular business model would be sustainable to either journalism and ultimately the owners and stockholders of the Atlantic. I understand your dilemma and it really is nothing personal, I assure you, and I wish you the best of luck.

So now, for those of you remained unclear on the state of journalism in 2013, you no longer are…./

Responses to FT Article: Death of Travel Guidebooks

The Financial Times article about new technology and the future of printed travel guidebooks was picked up on a Google Group called Travel Guide Writers, and brought up an excellent discussion on travel apps. All you budding travel writers should join this group to keep track on what's happening and new in the fast changing world of travel writing.

Here's the original post from the app vendor at Sutro:

Some thoughts and questions from the "other side" of this conversation

- I'm an App vendor that focuses on publishers with trusted content.

Promotion - There are 225,000+ applications in the Apple store, with the travel section growing by the day. We believe that creating the application is only a small part of the problem. Unless people purchase your application then you make no money regardless of how cheap it was to create it in the first place.

For people to find your application you either rely on luck, or you have to promote through other means such as web site or blog traffic. This is where the big name brands have the leg up - they built their brands when travel guides were physically printed books because they were big enough to bear the printing and distribution costs, and now they can leverage their brands to enable people to find their applications. Think about a LP book - how many people really recognize the author's name compared to LP's name? Yes, it is the author's (and editor's) work that created the book, but the brand is, in this example, LP.

Volume - Our applications are often in the top 12 "what's hot" list of the travel section on iTunes but the volume isn't where we want it to be. When we're the #1 travel application for a few days and still want to see increased volume, what does that say about the volumes of all of the other applications? This is a direct impact of the promotion piece above (we still need to help our publishing partners with their promotional pieces), but also raises the question of whether the market is yet ready for this new approach to delivering travel content. See below on this question.

Price - There is definitely a race to the bottom for application prices. Even LP has reduced their prices (across the board?) to less that $10; many travel applications are even lower than $5. We have heard that a $0.99 application is the sweet spot for Apple's developer iAd advertising as the conversion rate for a higher cost application will be too low to warrant the cost of the "pay per click" model that iAd offers - although we're not sure if that is general across all application types or specific to value add products such as mobile travel guides. A low volume at a low price is not a lot of money,whatever the revenue share split.

Shelf life- Newer applications covering the same destination are preferred by buying customers to older applications. This is human nature (magazines are always published a month ahead of time) but is also encouraged by Apple's store that by default lists applications newest to oldest. A typical print guide book has a 24 month edition
life before being revamped for the subsequent print run. We find a one or two monthly refresh of our applications helps to keep them higher in the various lists. But refreshes have to be meaningful; you can't just republish the same application with a new version number as existing users will start to moan in the reviews, and a bad review is hard to overcome. In our model we roll out new platform features every few months to have a meaningful refresh. But in a "roll your own" model" this could be hard to sustain, especially if a large number of titles are published to have enough volume to put food on the table and the only real means of improving the product is to add more
content.

Questions that we have at the moment are:

Is the market ready? Yes, there is a great deal of buzz around mobile applications (it's why we're playing in his arena) but is the buzz substantiated by people actually buying content? Big brands are able to dump their books into a mobile application but is that just their brand momentum carrying over into the mobile space for now? Given the race to the price bottom how is the value of the content promoted so that it bucks the pricing trend?

Travel books are likely to disappear, or have significantly less volume - see the figures that started this thread. What replaces them? Clearly the smartphone is the new "in" device with projected 10 times growth in the next three years. So travel guide users are likely to have a smartphone, but how is travel content delivered to this platform in a way to make it appealing enough to make people pay money for the content?

Will we have to wait out a period where users have tried the free Wikipedia content before realizing that there is a reason to pay for content from an author that knows his/her stuff?

Is there a minimum size of publisher that can survive? Is the "anyone
can build a cheap application" belief even true? Yes anyone *can*
build a cheap application, but can they earn a living from it? Is the
traditional "big organization with lots of dependent authors" model
still true today and will be tomorrow? I wonder if some of the bigger
publishers are working towards maintaining this status quo - I would
if I was them. But does the technology enable newer author led
consortiums to build their "big enough organizations" to publish
electronically, and do authors want to even do this?

Are mobile applications just the "loss leader" to bring eyeballs and
wallets to other products? Is this true now, and if so will this be
true forever?

Even if money cannot currently be made from mobile applications, do
authors still need to produce applications to stake a claim?

If we could wave a magic wand and have the perfect mobile application
distribution solution tomorrow, what would it look it?

We have our own hypotheses and answers to these questions that we're
actively testing out and discussing with our publishers. But I'm very
interested in hearing the "author's viewpoint" to these questions,
whether publicly here on this forum or via a private message.

Regards,
Colin

Death of the Printed Travel Guidebook?

Financial Times recently looked at new technology and how new gizmos may eventually replace printed travel guidebooks. While it seems inevitable, I'd say printed guidebooks will remain dominant for the near future until the technology is sorted out and ebook readers and IPad clones bring down the cost significantly.

A few notable comments here, but do read the entire article and be prepared for some technology headaches.

“The publishing world has been talking for years about how we are going to follow the music industry down the pan,” says Mark Ellingham, founder of the Rough Guides series, which has sold more than 30m books worldwide.“I don’t think that is going to happen tremendously quickly for publishing in general, but travel guidebooks are absolutely the front line. In travel it makes much more sense to have digital rather than traditional paper books.”

And the latest news from the front line is not good. In fact, over the past two and a half years, guidebook sales in Britain have fallen off a cliff. Sales for 2009 were down 18 per cent on 2007, and if the second half of this year follows the first, 2010 will be down 27 per cent on 2007, according to data from Nielsen BookScan. If the current rate of decline continues, the final guidebook will be sold in less than seven years’ time.

Lonely Planet’s Australia guide sold 20,015 copies in 2008, and just 13,530 in 2009 – a drop of a third (again, the figures are from Nielsen BookScan, covering sales from British retailers). The Rough Guide to France, which sold 11,943 in 2008, fell 45 per cent to 6,561 the following year. Worse is that these are considered bestsellers.

Of course, the fortunes of individual titles fluctuate with the launch of new editions and the fashionability of destinations, but average sales across the whole range paint an equally bleak picture. Last year, the average UK sale of each title from the leading five publishers was around 1,500 copies.

The reasons behind this sales collapse are all too apparent – a combination of new technology and recession. Fewer people are travelling so buy fewer guidebooks, while those that do still go away are more likely to download free information online rather than spending money on a book.

Sales figures may be dire, the challenges mounting, but this summer there’s a buzz in the world of travel publishing, a sense of being on the verge of a totally new era. The internet allowed people to research their trips themselves before setting out, but smartphone apps and iPads travel with them. Suddenly the guidebook publishers, who for years seemed to be looking on from the sidelines, unsure of how to make websites work for them, have found themselves with a medium that makes sense.

“I could see that if you got in early and created the most compelling products then it could be fantastically lucrative as well,” says Douglas Schatz, who last year gave up his job as boss of Stanfords, the venerable London travel book shop, to become Lonely Planet’s managing director for Europe, Middle East and Asia.

Remember those guidebook sales figures? The average title selling just 1,500 copies a year? Compare that with the fact that during the volcanic ash crisis, 4.2m Lonely Planet apps covering 13 destinations were downloaded within four days. Admittedly they were being given away as a free promotion to help stranded passengers, but it hints at the potential.

Selling apps online also lets publishers cut out conventional retailers, who have been squeezing margins aggressively and often dictated at what price a book will be sold.

Of course, over the past couple of years have seen many travel-related apps, some from airlines, hotels and others in the travel industry; others as extensions of travel websites, and lots of them free. But this summer publishers are piling into the app market, hoping to persuade customers that it’s worth paying for an app that comes with the guidebook brand’s trusted tone and voice.

Last month Ellingham, who sold Rough Guides in 2008, launched Cool Places, a series of 30 slick apps to UK destinations, including St Ives, Brighton and Whitby. In June, Footprint Travel Guides released its first apps, with 50 being rolled out by the end of this month. Rough Guides’ new apps debut later this year, and last week Lonely Planet launched its new Compass app – the first augmented reality app from a mainstream guidebook publisher. Their jostling for position is given extra impetus by the assumption that the market will explode as mobile roaming charges fall.

So will the printed guidebook disappear altogether? One scenario sees print becoming the preserve of photo-led “inspiration” books, for armchair reading before you go away. But even that market could be squeezed by the iPad. Lonely Planet, for example, recently released 1,000 Ultimate Experiences, an innovative iPad book for pre-travel inspiration that mixes photos, text and video.

Another theory is that books will become niche products covering special interests or remote, developing destinations without mobile coverage or the visitor numbers to merit an app. Bradt – known for its guides to almost comically uncommercial destinations, including North Korea and Iraq – actually saw sales rise by 2.25 per cent in 2009. And one of the few real success stories of recent years has been Punk Publishing, which produces the Cool Camping and Wild Swimming series, and saw sales double in the last four years.

Thomas Kohnstamm: Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

Right on, Thomas. I'll join you in Hell. You sound like my kinda guy. Southeast Asia is my beat, so guess what: been there, done that. And your comments about the miserable pay of travel writers, and the need to cut corners, is entirely correct.

Right on, Thomas.

Best Article: Away on Business. Read it.

Thomas Kohnstamm Website

Thomas Kohnstamm MySpace

Thomas Kohnstamm Wikipedia

Lonely Planet Forum on Thomas Kohnstamm

Amazon Title: Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

Amazon Books by Thomas Kohnstamm

The Age Australia April 13

Gadling April 13

Lonely Planet Profile April 14

Times Online April 14

WorldHum April 14

MediaBistro Profile

Brave New Traveler April 14

Away on Business April 15

Brave New Traveler April 18

Random House April 22

LA Times April 22

Jaunted April 22

New York Times Moment April 22

Vagabondish April 23

Robert Reid Talks about the Future of Travel Guidebooks

Robert Reid is a Lonely Planet writer who publishes an amazing internet guide to Vietnam, and doesn't mince words in his recent interview with WorldHum. He laments the demise of experienced travel guidebook writers for novices who will work for peanuts under the illusion it will lead to fame and riches, and thinks internet travel guides will someday replace traditional published guides, when technology advances and handhelds can display the chief advantage printed guides continue to have over internet sources: maps.

Robert Reid: I used to think the most important thing we guidebook authors did for travelers was hotel reviews. People like to have some sense of security that the $5 or $300 place they’re staying in won’t be a brothel or rat-infested dump. But the Internet has already completely changed this. Previously if I had a new budget hotel in a town center, or a mid-ranger with pool, travelers would have to wait nine or 12 months from the time I “discovered” it until it appeared in a guide.

Now Internet booking sites often get them immediately. When I went to China a couple years ago, I stayed at a brand new hostel in Beijing that the Trans-Siberian author had just found, but that hadn’t yet appeared in the guide. It was already full! I was amazed at how nearly all the people there had found it online, and were booking their full China trip’s accommodations online.

At a Lonely Planet workshop a couple years ago, I asked a high-up at LP who they saw as their biggest competitor, and they immediately answered “Google.” I was impressed. So publishers like LP definitely see the Internet as a growing competitor, and have for a while. When the BBC bought LP a couple months ago, one of the key things they cited for future development was online content.

Another thing is that many sites with travel content online don’t have maps. And maps are HUGE. I sometimes think seasoned travelers need only a map, with barebones details of few places to stay, and barebones details of what to see and where to eat. If they trust the author—and that’s a big if, of course—not as much needs to be said as some people think. This, again, is for seasoned travelers only.

The only other thing I fear regarding online guidebooks is if they follow the “I stayed here and it was great” TripAdvisor or Amazon.com model. Those are useful, no doubt, but they’re only based on isolated experiences. If publishers turn things over at some point to reader-generated content, you won’t have the authoritative overviews that guidebook writers can offer, and it’ll end up with deeper beaten tracks, with more travelers doing the same thing.

But I do want to say David Stanley is right, it’s sad and reckless if an old author who did good work on several editions is cut for a new author. In my opinion, in-house editors don’t completely understand what goes into researching these guides—I was an editor for years, and only figured it out once I started writing full time. The best experience for writing a guidebook to X is not living in X but actually having written a guidebook to X. Sometimes publishers forget that a bit.

Sometimes I think we’re living a doomed profession, and that we’ll look back on the wacky wild period from the 1970s to the 2000s when scores of notebook-toting travelers went and sought out the mysteries of places that are no longer mysterious. People will look back on the era like reading Graham Greene books about far-flung places at wilder times.

Will guidebooks in book form die? Probably so. But to be honest, I think there will always be room for the perspective of the “guidebook author,” at least online. Once hand-held devices get even more sophisticated, so that maps and reviews are more easily referred to—or we old folks die out and the younger generations who are not so soft on books take over—things will probably go online completely.

But I sometimes think people like holding those books. So far, though, the TripAdvisor-type sites are excellent resources, but don’t account for perspective. One person goes to Y hotel and says “it’s super!” But they don’t realize A, B, C are similar and $40 less. Who goes to all 15 museums in Bucharest but a guidebook author? So only they can tell you that something like the Romanian National Museum of the Peasant is about the best museum in the world?

WorldHum Interview with Robert Reid