Travelblather

The future of the guidebook – a series of guest posts by Mark Henshall

This is the second of a series of five guest posts – today answering the question:

Is the travel guidebook on the verge of extinction?

I’d rather look at the new and innovative ways we are now able to access travel information than talk of extinction. I see publishing evolving and opening up in an extraordinary way for travel content across different platforms. Agreed, though, there is a valid question on print to address here first about the future for the traditional guidebook.

The book market
In 2011, value sales for physical books overall were down 6.3% to £1.6bn in the UK year-on-year, according to Nielson Bookscan data. ‘The Atlases, Maps and Travel’ category which has consistently declined since 2007, saw sales fall by 8.1% to £70.5m.

There are some bright spots. The children’s sector has proved robust and overall the ASP (average selling price) has begun to increase once more, as discount levels plateau or drop off. To put it in context, if we look at the first half of 2011 in the UK market, Frommer’s was one of only a small handful of publishers which achieved year-on-year sell-through growth in world travel guide sales, according to the independent Travel Publishing Yearbook.

Categories such as Adult Fiction have been really hit hard. Hardback adult fiction sales are down 8.5% in value and paperback sales down 12.2%. This sector is perhaps one of those most susceptible to immediate e-book migration.

All of which brings us back to travel publishing…

Content mindset
Will the decline in traditional book sales, a migration to e-books and other formats, and a downward trend overall in print guidebook sales mean a redundant format pretty soon?

A Publisher betting its house on pure print travel guides will find it tough, no question. The pressures exerted are plain to see: bricks-and-mortar bookstores (witness Borders in 2011) under stress; a decline in retail space; a move to online sales; the increase in digital competition (e.g. Google/Zagat, TripAdvisor); new digital products; a digital savvy customer; younger travellers who have grown up on digital; the economy… the list goes on.

Publishers who retain a legacy “print vs digital” mindset and don’t adopt a more platform-neutral approach and sell format-agnostically will struggle. For Publishers who have print guides as a part of their wider offering (and more importantly think in these wider terms), I still think this format – as long as it doesn’t stand still - has an audience in the foreseeable future, albeit a much more modest one as part of the overall travel content experience.

 Value in Gutenberg
So, travel guides may not last as the dominant form of content for the travel experience, but I think they can still be an important part. Some consumers will baulk at the time lapse of the printing process - necessarily taking up a number of months – but others will not let that impact their purchase as it still holds value. This value is in a guidebook’s rich content and contextual application with other forms of information (add as appropriate: online travel features/forums/advice; mobile apps, enhanced e-books, UGC, video on tablet; blogs; Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter; travel operators/agents info; and friends/family’s advice).

You use a book in a different way to these other forms of information. Its weakness is really its strength. The way that some people actually prefer the simpler Kindle reading experience to that of the more complex smart phone or tablet is an interesting comparison - the fact that you can’t play around and click on links means you focus on the pure enjoyment of just reading. Seen in this light, the conventional travel print guide becomes a different kind of purchase: something to savour and reflect upon perhaps more than other formats, something more thoughtful. Also, just as it’s reductive to speak of “digital” as one homogenous lump, the same applies to “print”. I think it’s probably premature to assume that print doesn’t still offer the reader some variety of experience they may find useful. Indeed in self-publishing we’re sometimes seeing this come full circle: e-books to print books, and new-found, highly successful collaboration between publishers and self-publishers

The proliferation of new platforms for travel publishing may even add value to the humble book - who knows? As Tom Chatfield recently noted: “It’s a welcome paradox of a digital age that the ease of virtual communication has increased the emotional impact of physical objects such as letters and journals, placing them apart from the maelstrom of other media.”

Technology is transformative in that when it works well it helps to inform us, add enjoyment and enrich our travel experiences. It’s not hard to look up from a book and liberate ourselves to see a place for its own sake, without needing to be productive in any way; to record the moment or get a result, but instead just see and take pleasure in absorbing it. Cathy Haynes captures this rationale by saying: “A photograph can too easily become a substitute for the larger memory it was intended to protect.” Any smart alternatives to print guides will need to provide genuine improvement on travel experiences; be an aid to enjoying the destination rather than a gauze that removes the reader completely from the curiosity of the moment.

Some people also like the smell of books. (Okay, I like the smell of books…)

A combination that works
So, on a good day, the conventional guidebook definitely still works. Not always, and not everywhere, and it will be out-gunned in many areas to come, but as Tamsin Bishton-Hemingray outlined in an earlier guest blog post, the alternatives - take apps for example - are not there yet. And I’m saying that as someone involved in developing apps.

So in my opinion a combination of say, guidebook and Android or iPhone capabilities is a great arrangement, for the present time. If we discount data and roaming charges for now (which will certainly come down but are prohibitive at present), and/or assume data/maps being on the handset, and take it that the app data/content isn’t just a truncated version of the book but made to be a unique experience, it is still a different proposition. The app user experience is excellent for some things (immediacy, maps, finding a place of interest quickly) but for a more in-depth, rich, compelling and reflective read, the small screen delivery is far from perfect.

The tablet does offer a better experience for some of the above and, for stuff I’ve seen created for the children’s market in particular, there’s some incredible work being done. E-books/apps/tablets/online also offer both writers and publishers more instant feedback, on top of a great new experience. For now though, a physical guide still works well as a supplement, and the positioning of different platforms together can work for readers.

Underlying all this, of course, is not just how content is delivered but how it’s gathered, something Donald Strachan hit upon on Twitter recently, be that social, search or peers. A New York Times piece touches on this challenge, outlining convincingly the moves being made by tech companies in hardware at present, to try to cultivate ecosystems where consumers are offered a one-stop shop solution.

Have guidebooks had their day? What do you think?

The future of the guidebook – a series of guest posts by Mark Henshall

A key component for a successful guidebook is the relationship between writer and editor. Mark Henshall my Frommer’s editor has been a great encouragement, a steadying hand and a thoughtful advisor over the years. When we meet we often talk about wider trends in publishing and travel writing. From one of these chats in a Brighton coffee shop, the idea of a series of posts from Mark on Travelblather was born. We based them around five questions from me and five thought provoking and insightful answers from Mark in response.

1) What are the key trends for 2012 in travel guide publishing?

2) Is the travel guidebook as we know it on the verge of extinction?

3) How can a guidebook publisher innovate its way out of the declining guidebook market?

4) How does the changing guidebook marketplace affect guidebook writers and how do they need to adapt?

5) How is the pressure from online booksellers affecting traditional bookshops?

Mark will respond to comments too when he has time! All comments and the posts themselves express Mark’s personal opinions and not his publisher’s.

So, here’s the first post!

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1) What are the key trends for 2012 in travel guide publishing?

There are huge opportunities for publishers that embrace digital in the travel space. By adopting flexible, digital-first content management systems, it allows them to be more innovative and playful with content, and to offer exciting new capabilities and services to readers.

As traditional travel print guides become a smaller part of the market, we’ll see more platform-neutral publishers experimenting and increasing their social outreach activities. Many more app and online start-ups will come into the market focusing on niche areas of travel, but I also think we’ll see more self-publishing outfits emerge. Traditional guide companies will still invest in products that remain robust and competitive, and those who are able to, will experiment and diversify beyond this, whilst still playing to their established strengths. These will be joined by more non-publishing companies and communities. Games companies, broadcasters and internet developers will migrate into publishing as travel providers seek to create imaginative digital storytelling for a traveller’s “arc” (planning to post-trip and memories), and a virtuous circle of recommendation and engagement for the reader. This will all be heightened by a focus on developing direct contact with the consumer and the continued drive for brand differentiation as the market expands.

As the rush towards digital continues, I think e-books will be the big story of this year as they really go mainstream and get smarter. This won’t all be plain sailing. E-book piracy will be prevalent and as new digital devices (e-books to Android) proliferate and technologies advance there are the issues of “open standards” (can one of my gadgets talk to another on a different network?) and searching for interoperability solutions - not one size fits all  (trying to get e-files to fit different devices and DRM challenges). On the flipside, 2012 could be when customer data finally arrives in publishing courtesy of e-books, which may have a sizeable impact. Publishers may start to gain far richer information about their readers which should help them adapt and improve their products.

E-publishing in emerging economies is growing especially fast. In the densely populated BRIC economies, there is a huge expectation about the digital penetration of e-books, tablets and e-readers. According to a Publishing Perspectives report, Amazon is going full tilt to Rio eyeing the huge potential e-book market there with a new Kindle "vendor manager" in Brazil. Amazon’s Mauro Widman previously worked on developing the e-book platform of Brazil's bookshop chain Livraria Cultura and presentations to Brazilian publishers are expected this month. Amazon is also expanding into China with a new $95 million distribution centre in the South Eastern city of Nanning which is well placed for expansion into the rest of South East Asia too. Amazon has also just launched a beta e-commerce site in India called Junglee.com, allowing it and third party sellers to vend 12 million products by over 14,000 Indian and global brands, including books.

Meanwhile, Apple has launched a new multimedia app, iBooks Author, to allow writers to create their own e-books, albeit just through the iBookstore, in a move to rival Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing.

In Europe, there was evidence at the Italian e-book conference IfBookThen (IBT) that Europe is ready for an e-book revolution of its own and that this may offer competition to US-based tech giants such as Google and Apple. Spanish technology consultantt, Javier Celya pushed for the creation of a European-wide digital platform, citing Airbus as an example where such a collaboration has worked before in Europe. Whether this is realistic or not, there may be room for a new e-bookseller to emerge with a global reach and a multilingual platform.

I think travel publishing will begin to move more towards – and interact with - adjacent lifestyle spaces too. It’s something you can see a little of in the e-book market with players such as Small Demons. The social/sharing aspect of the e-book ecosystem will also increase (e.g. Good Reads and Anobii). Devices such as Kindle Fire will be updated and improved, and e-books/enhanced e-books will change the playing field significantly. It’s way too early to predict the various permutations that will evolve, but I certainly expect more short-form, episodic and serial work. Trey Ratcliff explains the short-form opportunity in more depth, highlighting the way that emergent behaviour in the ease of buying and downloading short-form e-books (e.g. for travel, think Ahmedabad instead of India), and social media acting as a marketing multiplier, will fuel this category.

The e-book purchasing experience is also becoming easier (downloading to your preferred device) and as retailers integrate their print carts with e-product, the real customer demand for “P+E bundles” (eg: a guidebook to Andalusia for background and planning and an app to Seville for on the ground exploration) will be harnessed. Publishers who have a robust mix of print and digital will be able to seize these opportunities. On the horizon is ePub3.0, something that could be very interesting for travel. Its new script interface (“scalable vector graphic” format) will allow new complex components and interaction (e.g. quizzes on destination e-books). A speech enabled “read aloud” mechanism could also be handy. So, say you’re in a cafe, for example, you could use the media overlay audio feature to help you order a coffee correctly from a phrase book. I’m sure they’ll be a lot to play with.

Other existing trends that will increase include: a rapid rise of travel video traffic online; audio voice recognition going mainstream; smart TV becoming more familiar; tablet smart books becoming more innovative; travel images becoming vital; and metadata/geo-coding to enhance local detail and travel experiences.

A tiny snapshot really. It's certainly an interesting time to be working in travel publishing!

What do you think?

Image by Flickr user: dannyman

Many people would say that price comparison websites like say Travelsupermarket.com; skyscanner or carrentals.co.uk do customers a huge service – by allowing them to choose the cheapest deals without having to do a stack of time consuming research. At its most basic level this is absolutely the case.

But, they focus people totally and utterly on price. Mercilessly.

By exhibiting a bunch of deals side by side with virtually no branding alongside they are a brand marketer’s nightmare. (All that cash spent carefully trying to differentiate your product from a competitor’s is just stripped away and levelled down to a price with little else.) And they quickly drive customers to think about nothing but the best price. Ever found yourself thinking 'hang on we're talking about £5 difference in price here!'

Some comparison sites do add back some extras into the mix – but the ultimate aim is to smooth all the products into virtual ubiquity so that people can make swift choices between them – driven by price and nothing else.

I wonder how great they are for customers too? This really commoditised marketplace is about cutting cost rather than innovation. Everyone is effectively selling the same stuff and spending much of their energy on the supply chain – cutting costs remorselessly to be able to compete more effectively on price.

But it’s not just about price is it?

A holiday, a flight, a hire car – all of these things are about way more than just a simple product and a price. (Particularly if things go wrong!)  I think it’s time people started really thinking about customer service and what it could add back into the equation.

I look a lot at the financial services industry and laugh at the idiocy of it all at the moment. So crap, so commoditised, so tied down by regulation, so stiffled of innovation. Ironically, all the banks have to differentiate themselves with is customer service. So they try remorselessly to convince us that they are 'on our side'. And fail to deliver because they don't make real fundamental changes to the way they  do business. If you're going to do customer service you have to do it from the top to the bottom of a business and be fanatical. Not enough to trot out some old tired cliches like the banks do.

But - travel is a 'real' people business and the touch points for delighting customers on say a package holiday are myriad. Customer service should be absolutely critical. What would it cost to add proper customer service back into the mix? A price differential of say £10 onto a booking of £100? I have no idea, but if you did it the smartest possible way and used technology to do it really efficiently… how much would it really cost? And - how much harder would it be for a competitor to copy you if you did?

The internet-fueled obsession with lowest cost and lack of balls to stand out from the crowd and say in the words of certain beer brand ‘we are reassuringly expensive’ is I think slowly screwing the industry.

And you know what, price comparison sites are so DULL. Holidays should be fun, inspiring and exciting - and that includes the purchase of them. Price matters... but there should be so much more to buying a holiday.

The only brand I can think of really selling on service right now is Virgin Holidays. Can you think of others?

Would you pay more for better service or does it have little or no influence on your booking habits these days?

I just checked - I published 23 posts in 2011. Just about one a fortnight. I had some help from some great guests too.

So, looking back, which of my posts do I think are really insightful? Which ones do I think I'd tell a newcomer to Travelblather to read? Here's my top 5 for 2011. Interestingly(?) they are often posts that didn't get that many comments. Perhaps because they are more distilled and emphatic with less room for discussion? What do you think?

Free Sucks - Seriously I hate it
This theme percolates through much of my writing here on Travelblather. The idea that free is always good is frankly lazy and stupid. It typifies the mindset of the dumb consumer endlessly feeding on stuff that they are thrown - just because they can. With no thought about why it's free and what the implications are longer term of accepting it. Free is often really, really bad. This post explains why.

Forget Content - Think Curation and Connections
One of my first posts of 2011, this I think remains pretty pertinent - why create yet more content just because you can if someone else has done a great job already? With the zillions of new pages of content being added all the time online, search engines are struggling to make sense of it all. Maybe real people hold the final answer!

Choose Your 'Friends' Wisely
Many commentators suggest that social media came of age in 2011. Did it? I'm not so sure. But one thing is for certain, our online connections will have increasing importance as we go forward - in all sorts of ways. Some good, some bad. Maybe we need to think more carefully about who we are 'friends' with online and why?

Will Quality Content Beat Social Connections?
Just one comment on this post. But for me it's a bit of a call to arms for content creators. I feel strongly that the skills we possess are so undervalued in the online world. I remain convinced - as I say in this post - that quality, niche content written by experts will outlast the current excitement about social media and the social graph.

Endemic Corruption Or Just A Travel Press Trip?
OK. This one did garner a lot of comments (over 50). As often happens when the comments snowball, they went off topic quite a bit. There's some really interesting innovation going on with the travel blogging community as they seek to monetize their work more aggressively. I admire their boldness, but because travel bloggers are publishers as well as writers they risk alienating their readers if they get too caught up in chasing the bucks too overtly.

Thanks everyone who has read and commented in the last year. It's been great fun!

Any posts you found particularly useful? Anything you'd like to see more or less of in 2012? I'd love to hear what you think.

Welcome the very excellent Tamsin Bishton-Hemingray - previously Head of Content at iCrossing and all round super-experienced web content person. I can't recommend her highly enough if you're looking for help with content or content strategy.

I've been badgering her to write me something for Travelblather... and now, here it is!

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This summer I spent a wonderful week inter-railing around Italy with my family. We spent 36 hours in Venice, a couple of days in Rome and a couple on the coast in the Cinque Terra national park. As well as being a fantastic holiday, it also gave me the opportunity to try out a travel app on my HTC Android phone, which being a content geek was quite exciting to me. I was really disappointed by the experience. This blog post explains why, and why I think that travel publishers have got to work a lot harder on their apps before they are going to put good, old-fashioned guidebooks out of business.

Planning the trip
Planning this holiday required some forethought. There were a lot of things that we wanted to do and see in Venice and Rome, and only limited time to do and see them all in. We sorted out our accommodation online ahead of time using a combination of TripAdvisor recommendations for Venice and Rome, and a superbly useful B&B website which uses a searchable Google map to help you find a B&B exactly where you want one – in my case the tiny village of Manarola.

Then we turned our thoughts to planning our holiday activities. Despite both being web-savvy types, we headed straight to the book shop – because in our experience online travel content of this kind is still poorly lacking.

Guidebooks, ebooks, maps or apps?
We went to the lovely Waterstones in Brighton and sat down in the travel section to work out what we needed. My husband had youthful brand loyalties to Lonely Planet while I had fond memories of a week in Paris when I was 18 with the Rough Guide as my companion - so we knew we wanted a guide book. But should we buy one each for Venice and Rome, or just buy one for the whole of Italy?

As we browsed the bookshelves we also searched the Android Marketplace for apps. These were much cheaper than the printed guidebooks.  But we wanted to balance cost with having enough detail to help us get the best out of our holiday.

And then there were maps. We definitely needed a good map of Venice, and one of Rome.

In the end we bought the following:
Rome Compass (Lonely Planet app) – 49p
The Rough Guide to Italy (10^th edition, March 2011) - £15.99
Pocket Rough Guide to Venice (Including large map) written and researched by Jonathan Buckley - £7.99

We were relying on the app to be our map in Rome, and the pull-out large scale map in the Venice guidebook to help us there.

How good were our guides?

App: Lonely Planet Rome Compass
I downloaded this app for 49p while we were still browsing in Waterstones because it was published by Lonely Planet. In fact, it was the only relevant app that I could find on the Android Marketplace from a publisher I trusted.  I was surprised how important this issue of trust was. My phone is an important tool – and I felt nervous about downloading an app from a publisher  I didn’t know. I felt even more nervous about giving my credit card details to them. So I rejected unknown publishers immediately.

I was excited by the Rome app because the blurb said you could use your phone’s camera function to display an “augmented reality” map giving you directions to the places you wanted to go to in Rome, a bit like a SatNav display from your phone. As I fired it up in Waterstones, I realised that, durrr, I was going to have to wait until I was in Rome itself to see how this actually worked from a usability point of view! There was also static content in short guidebook-style sections – Eat, Drink, Sleep etc. But the content in here wasn’t very detailed and didn’t provide indications of things like price range – something that was a critical factor for us. We were holidaying on a budget.  And it was also clunky to search for things and there didn’t seem to be a way to search by location or type of restaurant without using the map function.

So before I even got to Rome I was feeling a bit nervous about using this app.

Once there, things got worse. I had been receiving regular text messages from my provider (Vodafone) about my data usage reminding me that I had a “passport” and so would pay a fixed fee for a certain amount of data usage – but then an astronomical amount per MB once I passed my limit. It meant that I got worried about using data services on my phone. And without data services, the app was next to useless. On the couple of occasions I turned it on, it was so slow to load that my husband had already found what we needed to know in our print edition Rough Guide To Italy.

After our first afternoon of failing to find our way around with the app, I switched it off. We got a great map from the reception of our B&B – complete with the receptionist’s recommendations on how to get to the major sites, and we used the Rough Guide for everything else.

In short, the app was crap. This was partly because it was so hard to search for stuff, and partly because with roaming costs for mobiles still so high, I was just too worried about my mobile bill to use it.

Lonely Planet need to give users a clear indication of the amount of data the app is likely to use. They also need to add content and make it much more easy to search and bookmark for future reference. For me one of the advantages of a digital guidebook should be that I can carry around lots and lots of information without having to carry around a weighty book. Having less detail than the print version just doesn’t make sense.

Rough Guide to Italy
This rocked in comparison to the app. Easy to find stuff (just use the index), quick to flick through, simple to bookmark (just fold the corner), fun to browse in more detail on train journeys (no batteries or mobile signal required), jam-packed with reliable and important detail, it absolutely trounced the app. We used it for Venice, Rome and Cinque Terre and also had fun reading up about the parts of Italy that we just glanced fleetingly through the window of our train. Yes it was 30 times more expensive than the app, but it was worth every penny.

But – as with my previous experiences of Rough Guides – the small maps included alongside the fantastic detail were consistently pretty useless and often completely wrong. We would have got lost many times if we had relied on them. So it wasn’t completely perfect.

Pocket Rough Guide to Venice
We bought this because of the pull out map, and because we were worried the Rough Guide To Italy wouldn’t have enough detail. Actually, we could have lived without it. And the pull out map was a little bit inaccurate when it came to locating recommended cafes and gelateria. The best map we found to Venice was (like the one used in Rome) the one that was provided to us by our fabulous B&B; it was clear, easy to understand, accurate and free. We brought one home with us to use next time we visit Venice.

So what?
As a content geek, I’ve been reading for years now about how mobile phones are becoming our favourite way to access content of all types. I was really excited about the idea of an app that would fuse Google Maps data and guidebook content into a new format right there in the palm of my hand. But practicalities got in the way. There are a few people who will take their phones on holiday with them and not worry about the cost of use. But there are a lot more people like me who really worry about that expenditure. I might just take the risk if the content in the app was more detailed, more up to date and easier to access. But it wasn’t.  There was less detail than the guidebook. And on top of that, you just can’t flick through an app the way you can flick through a book. These are both critical flaws in my opinion.

For me, the bottom line is that the new medium isn’t enough. The content and the experience have to be top notch too. Based on the Compass experience, I think travel apps still have a way to go.