Travelblather

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

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

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

Regardless of the format, the starting point still has to be excellent quality content and expertise. Even before we get into delivery/platform discussion, I think long-term (and especially since the Google Panda updates) this is paramount. I also think it is worth not losing sight of the fact that high-quality travel experiences can be life-changing; creating rich, meaningful stories. You want to match that passion within the travel community by creating the most inspiring and imaginative tools for travellers - from print to online to apps.

To be relevant it’s important to experiment, be flexible, evolve products for a rapidly changing market and know your audience. Publishers need to drive innovation and technological advances to create exciting and indispensible products, strive to improve content, and form solid and productive relationships with authors and partners.

The digital arena offers a huge opening for Publishers looking to be creative and offer travellers stimulating new content. Perhaps because the wider community (e.g. Science, Technology, Education) at Wiley (Frommer's' umbrella publisher) demanded digital early on we’ve been able to move travel towards other platforms quickly. Peter Balis, director of digital content sales for Wiley’s P&T division, has recently outlined how this digital shift and new infrastructure happened.

Some of what we’ve been trying at Frommer’s lately has included a significant new push on Frommers.com to create rich, engaging content (news, features, expert advice & travel ideas, tips & tools, newsletters, forums, deals, slideshows…), resulting in both a rapid growth in page views but also in reader engagement (which, interestingly, is much higher with users browsing on an iPad). Frommer's is also developing new apps, ShortCut e-books; Remix custom guides; and engaging more widely through social media. It’s also a time for trying new partnerships such as Frommer’s collaboration on the new Wenzani app with Lonely Planet and Time Out, breaking new ground.

On the B2B side, Publishers can also obviously gain from the flexibility of high quality content with detailed metadata to provide inspiring local detail and travel experiences, insider knowledge and a fresh perceptive. Here’s a look at what we’ve been working on for clients from WTM in November.

It’s a really exciting time to be in travel publishing. When you have an idea you’re thinking ‘could this make an online feature, app, enhanced e-book, short e-book, video, slide show, audio guide, series, standalone book?’ Or all of the above.

The digital world creates a really exciting arena to reach readers in a creative way.

What other challenges and opportunities do you see for guidebook publishers?

Image by WanderingTheWorld

Let’s call a spade a spade. A Public Relations (PR) company is there to ensure that its clients get maximum positive exposure – often at the expense of their client’s competitors (either intentionally or otherwise.) That’s what they are paid to do. I often feel that travel writers, editors and travel bloggers forget that. Ultimately a PR’s role is about influencing the supposedly ‘impartial' editor/writer/blogger to the advantage of their clients.

Right. Now we’ve got that out of the way… a little history. Fairytale or hardcore documentary? I leave it to you to decide:

A good few decades back, before PR really existed in the travel sector and way before the internet, the way travel cos got themselves into the travel sections of newspapers and magazines was advertising. They paid top whack to put ads next to relevant travel editorial. And in those days it worked. There were few other places potential customers could read about travel or find information about travel cos to book their holidays with. As a punter, I remember these days. You’d tear out and keep the travel section. Not for the features, but for the ads with phone numbers of travel cos. So you could call them up from work on your lunch hour and get quotes for your trip to Thailand or wherever. Anyone else remember?

In those days I don’t know how travel writers got their trips organised for them so they could write them up. Heck, they might have had enough budget to just pay and go on them – but I reckon that’s unlikely. I imagine that the all-powerful travel editor would choose a particular travel co whose products he liked the look of and call them and ask for a free trip so he could write about them. And with the sort of clout his publication had, I imagine they were only too happy to help. For travel editors and writers it must have been happy days. Good pay, nice trips, decent budget for creating really great looking travel sections. And they could write whatever they felt like about these trips too. (Is THIS the job that the wannabee travel writer/blogger aspires to? A dream that no longer exists?)

And then PR came along.

The new middleman (or very often, woman) sold in easily to the frustrated other travel cos who never seemed to get featured in the editorial sections of travel supplements. “Pay us and we’ll do the legwork hassling editors to get you published. And we’ll also make sure they publish the right kind of things about you too.”

Perhaps oddly, editors allowed themselves to be persuaded by the PR people. Is this testament to editors being lazy or PR people being great sales people? Maybe it’s a bit of both.

One way or another the PR pitch worked. Really well. More and more travel cos took on PR agencies to push their products at editors. PR people developed new tools – ‘press trips’; ‘press releases’ - ways to show off their clients' products in carefully controlled environments. They started to more or less write the stories themselves, doing more and more of the journalist's job. And all of it was about influencing editorial impartiality. Making sure their client got the right kind of coverage in the editorial space. Slowly but surely PR influence grew. And, nobody really took much notice. Eventually any travel co wanting to get noticed by travel editors needed to spend cash on PR. Otherwise they just wouldn’t get a look in.

And. If you were a travel co then - where would you spend your hard earned marketing budget? On really expensive adverts – which only ever seemed to get more and more pricey. Or on a PR agency who seemed able to get you the right kind of mentions in the editorial bits of the travel section relatively easily? Particularly as a mention in the editorial chunk of the paper was potentially far better - because implicitly it suggested endorsement by the publication. (It felt like a recommendation - from someone who really knew what they were talking about.)

There was no competition. PR won out over advertising hands down.

I think the net result was that travel cos switched their spending from traditional advertising to PR.

Now I’d be the first to admit that the internet has played the biggest part in killing the traditional advertising model for printed travel supplements and magazines which has led in many peoples' eyes to a deterioration in the quality and the breadth of travel editorial. But I think PR has really quickened the process.

- More money spent on PR by travel cos = less money spent on advertising.

- Less money spent on advertising = smaller editorial budgets.

- Smaller editorial budgets = travel editors all the more keen to take content written by or with help from PR agencies (because it's cheaper to do so).

- Smaller editorial budgets = less pay for travel freelancers, less cash for in-depth research.

- Ultimately… smaller editorial budgets = poorer quality travel writing.

Ever wondered why large chunks of travel sections are ‘charticles’ – Top 20 this, Top 50 that? Ever wondered why only a tiny minority of travel features are overtly critical? Ever wondered why some destinations seem to get written about time and time again whilst others hardly get a mention?

I think this is at least one of the reasons.

Do you agree?

Image: Flicker user lululemon

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’ve blathered a bit already about ‘free’.

I don’t buy this myth precipitated by internet companies and web savants – (Google, Chris Anderson etc) that somehow content just arrives by magic online with no cost associated with it. And somehow people make lots of money. It seems to me that almost all of the time, the people who create the free content (publishers, academics, enthusiasts) don’t make the money. It’s the tech companies that package and deliver it – think iTunes, Google again and so on.

I think 2012 is going to be a really interesting year for content and for monetization.

From my experience of talking to big media organisations and one-(wo)man blog operations alike, advertising alone usually does not pay your way. There are too many pages online chasing our eyeballs for the necessary scale to be achieved. And of course the number of pages keeps on and on growing.

As the world economy continues to slump, publishers – small and large – are just not going to be able to keep funding the creation and curation of free content in the vague hope that some day they will make money.

So... There’s pressure to monetize like never before.

Then there’s the Google panda update. For those who aren’t familiar with this, Google made quite radical changes to the way they rank pages about 6 months ago. The key reason for these changes was to try and stamp out the really poor quality content that clogged up search results. Content farms that published 100s even 1000s of pages every day using search term research to create poorly written pages of content that did just enough to make Google think they were decent. (Here’s how you do make money from advertising – by creating monstrous scale – and not giving a toss about readers.)

Panda kind of worked – a lot of the crap has dropped right off the search results. Many bonafide companies would argue they have been unfairly demoted too however, whilst big brands seem to have done rather well.

So... Quality content and a well-known, trusted brand matter like never before.

For the travel sector (and probably many others) I now see a really interesting race taking place between travel publishers and travel businesses.

Travel Publishers
The free content (aka advertising) model doesn’t work, so publishers (newspaper travel sections, travel magazines) will have to find other revenue streams for their online operations. They could put up paywalls and charge you to read. Some have done that – but general consensus would seem to be it’s hardly delivering vast revenues.

So, either the quality of their free content will have to diminish (they’ll cut costs even more to try and at least break even with what ad revenue they are achieving) or they’ll have to sell us stuff much more overtly. Maybe a combination of both. Think more Top 20-style charticles with more overt ‘buy this holiday now’ messages alongside. (We could get to a point where the website and the print editions look increasingly different as a result. In fact I’d argue for this model to work, they should be. Radically so.)

Travel Businesses
There has been much talk of brands as publishers. The idea that online, anyone can publish stuff, so why not be a publisher too? But up to now I don’t see many that have taken this idea really seriously. By this I mean doing far more than sticking up some destination guides and trying to get customers to add reviews. This could all change with the impact of Google’s panda update. Think of the typical online travel agent (OTA) (someone like Expedia) or the metasearch engine (someone like Travelsupermarket.com). I know nothing about the SEO strategy of these businesses, but I’d bet they’ve spent a lot on old school SEO over the years – using link building and all the other smart ways that SEO people know to ensure that they stay top of search results... with far, far less investment in quality content. But, me-too bog-standard content isn’t working so well now. Google is pushing people to create better, more authoritative content by implementing the panda update. The quality of its content will increasingly impact how high up the search results a website is. The smart online travel businesses (big and small) are beginning to get this. They are investing in really good, well written content. And if they are smarter still they will keep investing.

What I find fascinating about this situation is that travel companies have a huge advantage over publishers. They have a business model that works. They sell holidays/flights etc. and make money. The publishers don’t (yet).

Who is best placed to dominate in the travel sector online ultimately?

Can the publishers plug product into their online offering without giving the impression that their hard-earned reputation for impartiality is now worthless? Conversely can the travel companies publish really excellent unbiassed content without reverting to their standard mantra of buy, buy, buy?

I think 2012 could be the year we really see.

Image  aveCrosby

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.