Lonely Planet Guidebooks have been around for a while and they are one of the first publications dedicated to budget travel -something we do. More importantly, they are the most popular guidebooks around. Lonely Planet books are frequently updated, written in an inspiring – often humorous – way, and provide information without bias. They are simply great, BUT … is Lonely Planet killing blogs?
Travel Bloggers’ Guides
Travellers experience the destinations all the time and some of them share their stories with the world on their blogs. These mini guides contribute to the wealth of collective knowledge, which is few-clicks-away – wherever you are in the world. Whatever destinations you’re visiting, more likely than not there was someone who wrote about it – often very recently. These real stories can help another traveller get a feeling of a place before arrival, recommend places to stay, eat, party, or things to do. There’s a lot of information out there, scattered across the web, all within your reach. A variety of stories, from many authors with different preferences – all to be discovered by you.
Lonely Planet Guidebooks
In a nutshell, Lonely Planet does the same – in a more minimalistic manner. Lonely Planet Guidebooks predominantly consist of concise summaries and bullet-pointed recommendations. Enough to get around, but probably too little to learn more of what the destination really has to offer. Since they are so popular – and still growing in popularity – they replace the first-handed experience written on travel blogs. To some extent they do kill travel blogs by taking away the readers who opt for the book (paper or electronic).
Our opinion on the matter
In our (me and Agness) opinion, the answer is no. While the availability of all-you-need-to-know in one place takes away many people otherwise looking for the alternative source of information on travel blogs, there is no escape for something similar getting published by someone else. There’s no escape from that and that’s good, because not everyone has the time to replace a short summary with a search for appropriate blog post. It’s easier, quicker and still quite reliable.
Also, Lonely planet supports travel bloggers! If it wasn’t for Lonely Planet retweeting my post last year, we may not have got this serious about blogging. With a single tweet, Lonely Planet changed our blogging experience. I believe we are not the only ones with similar experience.
Is Lonely Planet Killing Travel Blogs? Speak your mind :)
