Global Nanpa

Lonely Planet : the slow death of travel guide books ?

Since publishing Across Asia on the Cheap in 1973, Lonely Planet has grown to become the largest independent travel-guidebook publisher in the world.
Lonely Planet publishes over 600 titles, has over 400 employees and more than 6.5 million Lonely Planet books are sold annually.

However they have a huge debt and cashflow problems. They are profitable but the profit is small and margins are tiny too. I would estimate that they made revenues of around 80 to 100 million USD in 2007. There is no official number.

In October 2007 BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), has acquired Lonely Planet in a deal that will build the Lonely Planet franchise.
The privately owned business was being sold by Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who founded the company in 1972, and John Singleton who became a shareholder in 1999. They founders still remain 25% of the shares.

The Lonely Planet is currently aggressively building up video guides and since April/May 2008 offering $500 to buy the rights of short videos (under 10 min) from amateur travellers. That’s of course faster and easier than letting it shoot by their own staff. Quality is however an immense problem. Resolution of the videos are 640X480 and lower, no HD. Moreover I find almost all of the about 300 videos i watched so far not really interesting. They don’t portray the places well and there is no structure in it and certainly it is amateur style and not professional. Quiet a nice deal for the amateur selling it for $500.
Lonely Planet launched a youtube travel video channel on April 10th, 2008. Maybe my blog inspired them to this step and they were afraid of falling behind ? I was first worldwide. LOL.
They currently have around 1000 videos on their Lonely Planet TV channel.
1000 videos cost them half a million USD. That’s crazy. If they continue buying up videos like now, they will have spent 1 million USD on poor quality videos this year. This million will most likely also erase the whole profit of 2008.

It is clear for me and also for the Lonely Planet management that video guides are the future and not travel books. Their books almost don’t have any pictures at all. Maybe that was cool 20 years ago but not today anymore.
Moreover you can almost get all the info of their guides for free in the net. The smart travellers simply print out the maps and info they need. Lonely Planet used to focus on budget travellers since its beginning and budget travellers are on a budget and prefer not to spend an extra 20 bucks for the book even if it is more convenient to have it summarized in a nice format.
That problem the Lonely Planet management also became aware of in the last years and suddenly started to integrate upscale hotels and accomodations for the more affluent travellers who might be more able and willing to buy their books because they don’t care about an extra 20 bucks anyway if the guidebook has a good reputation which is fitting to their needs.
Well, well, Lonely Planet shifting between 2 worlds and pissing off their own budget traveller base. From my point of view the Lonely Planet guides have a very poor reputation among „real“ travellers and everyone is getting mad seeing „wannabe’s“ with their Thailand and Cambodia guides running around.
I am certainly not a „real“ hardcore traveller like them but i do understand their worry and frustration.
I myself am the luxury, affluent, frequent traveller, the Lonely Planet would like to have as customers now. It won’t work. I stick to information I find myself in the net, I have my own opinions, find my own ways and continue producing video guides and get inspired by watching those of others.

I believe the Lonely Planet will have a hard time selling a lot of copies of their Thailand guide in about 10 years if things develop like now and they don’t come up with any brilliant, fresh innovation. The only very valuable thing they currently own is the Thorn Tree forum and the known brandname itself.

CEO Judo Slatyer’s farewell, 2 months ago who left to become the CEO of WWF

http://www.lonelyplanet.tv/Clip.aspx?key=8483E3211A920641

They still haven’t found a replacement for her…
Still wanna work for the Planet or buy a guide ? Better sell a crappy 500 bucks video to them to have your next flight ticket sponsored by some weird people. LOL.