About a decade ago, the Rough Guides & Lonely Planet travel books series, virtually considered bibles for the tourists, went online. However, the two rivals discovered that their journey on the internet was anything but smooth.
The pure information based Guidebooks were fast overtaken and overshadowed by more aggressive upstarts like TripAdvisor. These sites started drawing content from voluntary contributors and succeeded in generating revenues through links to online reservations systems & ads.
Now the traditional travel publishers are engaged in a catching up game. They are speedily switching more of their content onto the internet, and extending their brands into new territories like mobile services, satellite navigation devices and in-flight entertainment systems.
The recent acquisition of a majority stake in LP by the commercial arm of the BBC, BBC Worldwide, has prompted the former and so also its rivals to speed up their search for new revenue sources in the online world & elsewhere.
Till now, the digital-media revolution has been far less turbulent for traditional publishers of guidebooks than that for record companies, fighting blatant online copying. Sales of travel guides, though being flat in Britain, have been registering a satisfactory growth in developing countries and even in the US despite a weakened dollar.
But the fact remains that the guidebook firms have not been able to fully capitalise on an opportunity provided by the internet to generate revenues which was well spotted by TripAdvisor.
The travel portal have spotted the huge potential in users’ reviews of package trips, hotels and tourist attractions, collecting a certain fee every time they happen to click through to book a room, for example, on a partner site. The site supplements these reviews with links to websites run by some other guidebook publishers such as Frommer’s. TripAdvisor, owned by Expedia, has certainly been a major success in leveraging the power of internet and tapping the potential of online audience.
The established Guidebooks like the Rough Guides & Lonely Planet now want to follow suit, before it’s too late…