Lonely Planet Travel Guides Dumped At "Big Loss" By BBC
Chances are you have at least a couple of Lonely Planet guides on your bookshelves, or in a box in your parents' garage along with very thin tax returns from the 1990s or early 2000s. I still have a couple of very outdated books—not for the informational value today, which is minimal, but because they're time capsules of how those countries were when I was traveling around years ago. And now BBC, which has owned the independent travel guide since 2007, is selling the brand at a big loss to some American billionaire who may also have fond memories of the densely packed books.
The books still sell pretty well, with Lonely Planet being the best-selling travel guide in the UK, but BBC says it doesn't want anything to do with the nice company and "would not make this sort of acquisition again." But I'm probably not the only person who quit buying guide books around the time wifi became common, and now thinks a laptop is too much trouble to carry around.
Photo by The Wandering Angel.
I stopped buying Lonely Planet books when the "hotel" they directed me to in Luxor was on a street that didn't exist in an unlit industrial neighborhood with roaming packs of violent feral dogs. But that's another story.
I hate throwing away travel guides. For one thing, they aren't cheap. For another, my TV is balanced by three books on Amsterdam with guides to now-illegal weed cafes. But also, the Time Out guides have all that fancy photography. Yet in the end, all travel guides will eventually only appear as auto-updated RSS feeds on your iPad, anyway.
I still have an old 'Let's Go' Europe edition, kept to salivate over the $4 lunch specials in restaurants that are now probably Ikea stores.
An iPad? What, and look like a tourist?
An iPad can't telegraph to house guests how well-traveled you are like a bookshelf full of dog-eared Lonely Planet guides.
Yes it can (telegraph). In more senses than one.
»Not looking as a tourist« is hard to achieve if
one IS a tourist, but schlepping one's iPad hidden
inside a book-like case/cover goes a long way
towards that goal. Mind you, walking around
tourist spots with half-French-band hardcover
"book" with an iPad inside is even more touristy
than were the device naked.
Travel guides are still surprisingly useful in some countries. For instance, I went to Australia last year and most of their businesses are surprisingly behind the times compared to the US or UK when it comes to small places having any sort of web presence. I think Yelp had only arrived in Australia like 3mo. before we visited, so it was mostly just barren and often incorrect listings. (And I couldn't find any sort of Aussie yelp-equivalent). Also wifi was hilariously sporadic, expensive, and rare in the places we stayed.
That said, I still relied heavily on TripAdvisor and Wikitravel, but having a physical travel guide — even one a year or two out of date — was a big help.