Great article Matt, I recently bought the latest edition of the LP guide to Mexico & wish I hadn’t bothered. As guides book go, for me, Rough Guides is a much better option. I prefer the style much better. But the real disappointment is that there are little to no budget accommodation recommendations for many places. Which as an experienced traveller you know is BS, but if you are new to travelling I think it’s really unfair because you could end up skipping somewhere due to presuming – on LP’s reputable advice – that you can’t afford those prices.

Wow, I haven’t thought about the thorn tree message board for years! Back when I took my first RTW trip in 2002, the TT was THE place to go for information. I just looked at it again for old times sake, and it’s a sad shell of what it used to be. Unfortunately I don’t even know where to go anymore for real time discussions about destinations. Tehnicheskij pasport na mnogokvartirnij dom obrazec. Thorntree used to be for budget travelers, Trip Advisor seems to be full of package and cruise ship travelers, blog comment sections aren’t real time enough.

Generally speaking, India’s climate is defined by three seasons – the hot, the wet (monsoon) and the cool, each of which can vary in duration from north to south.

I miss that community for sure. Thanks for an interesting article documenting the downfall of a once great company. I haven’t bought a LP guide since collegenot so much because I noticed a decline in quality at the time, I think it just became easier to do research and find up to date info on cool spots online. Ironic that their website seems to be providing an abbreviated version of what you can find on Google.

I do think there’s still a gap to be filled that they’re missing out on, though. While it is easy to find a lot of info with a Google search, it’s the curation that’s lacking.

Even if I find a popular blog post with a “guide” to the city or country I’m visiting, very few are really authorities (i.e. The blogger only spent a week there). This article explains so much! For a few years now I’ve harbored growing doubts about LP. It’s so horribly obvious when a brand goes into bland profiteering mode.

Their look and feel lost all it’s soul when they were taken over. And you’re right about the increasing lack of organisation in the way the guides are structured and worse still, the recycling of old information. I feel quite cheated to hear these guides are being written from an office rather than on location, although it doesn’t surprise me.

I’ve often gone out of my way to stay or eat at one of their recommendations and then spent my time there suspiciously contemplating whether the author had perhaps been bribed. I still buy Lonely Planet guides to plan my trips but they’re more like a book case souvenir now than an actual resource. Modnij dom dekorativnie panno katalog. I lost faith in them when they started to sell PDF chapters for destinations. I bought one for Bialystok in Poland, printed like 4 pages in total and understood it is a dull place with few attractions. I went there and found a major tourist city with tons to offer, and 95 of it wasn’t on the chapter I had bought. I do buy them when they have 3-for-2 offers but only for destinations I often travel to, for bigger maps and descriptions of the cities, and also for ideas of regional transport. But I never buy an updated version, better read the old book and check-up online.

Having written a successful guidebook myself (see The Traveling Professor’s Guide to Paris on Amazon.com), let me give you some insight on what goes into writing a travel guidebook. First and foremost, you need to understand that their job is TO SELL AS MANY BOOKS AS POSSIBLE.

The book doesn’t need to be good, the book doesn’t need to be well-written (in my travel writing classes, I use Rick Steve’s guide books as examples of bad travel writing), but the book needs to SELL. So, what a publisher/writer will do is produce a book that appeals to the widest audience possible.

This is what probably happened to LP. At first, they appealed to a specific audience and they did a good job at it.

Now, they want to appeal to a wider audience. And guess what? Quality suffers. Personally, I think guide books should find their audience and write to it. In the guide book business, it is nearly impossible to be all things to all people -which is what LP is probably trying to do. I’ve found the Moon guides to be pretty useful, although they tend to be “too complete” in that they mention every crappy thing. But still, I can quickly skim through and find the things that interest me.

On a recent trip to Yellowstone, the Moon guide was quite useful. I miss the old LP ones, though – they were fantastic. These days, I go to the local mega-bookstore, grab the available guides for my destination (don’t buy, just read), sit in the cafe, and start looking them over. Then I decide which one to get. A long article. But a really good one with an objective point of view.