User Travel Guides vs. Professional Travel Guides
(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
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Frankly I’ve always enjoyed travel guides especially the well written version by Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, or Columbus Guides. Since the growth in popularity of user generated sites like Wikitravel and World66 I’ve cast off the shackles of paper and gone digital for my guides preferring the advice and recommendations of average travelers. The BBC recently reported that a Lonely Planet author admitted that he hadn’t even visited some of the countries he wrote about, bringing into doubt the reliability and credibility of not just the Lonely Planet brand but all travel guide books.
In my opinion, there is a place for both the professionally written guide book and the user generated guide book in the travel marketplace. First of all, professionally published guide books have a quality and credibility that, even in the face of scandal, are much stronger and more routed then user generated content. The production quality of a professional guide book is generally also much better then the user generated equivalent. However, the quality of on-line guides is changing and WikiTravel, for instance, is now offering print versions of their best guides in direct competition to the existing guide books through their WikiTravelPress division. The on-demand book printing is powered by LuLu.com, a leader in the online book printing biz, and allows for monthly changes in content, which is not possible with traditional print.
Now, if we could get professional writers contributing to community driven sites like WikiTravel and finding ways to still make a living, that would be great… but unlikely.
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Written by Stephen Joyce · Tags travel guides · Filed Under Destinations, Featured, Social Media, Travel 2.0 ·
“Now, if we could get professional writers contributing to community driven sites like WikiTravel and finding ways to still make a living, that would be great… but unlikely.”
This is exactly what we’re doing at vivatravelguides.com.
We publish print-on-demand guidebooks that all start off on the web as “user generated content”. Most of the users are compensated by per article/review pay and also revenue sharing of advertising displayed on the pages the author wrote.
We think a hybrid model of both pro and amateur reporting model will yield the most accurate, trustworthy, and up-to-date guidebook content. We have travel writing courses (see http://www.vivatravelguides.com/bootcamp/) and many strategies for maintaining the most accurate info possible.
The titles from our first two countries (Ecuador and Peru) consistently outsell all other brands except for Lonely Planet on Amazon.com, so it seems like the model is working well.
It certainly looks like an interesting model. I checked out the site and you have a lot of coverage for South America. Now that you’ve seen success with these two books are you planning on expanding into other regions. The other question I have is whether or not you have a model in place for re-distributing content. The benefit of using opensource or keeping the content in the public domain is the ability to re-distribute the content without cost. What are your thoughts on this?
I read this article on BBC.co.uk also. There has definitely been a shift towards social travel guides where users can share information and offer recommendations on places. I know that when I am planning to travel I consult friends for get their opinion, as well as looking at online reviews and comments for the most up-to-date information. In this instant gratification culture, we want information now, and not spending an hour going through guide books at the book store.
tripwolf is a new social travel guide that offers both professional content and user generated content. But your point of re-distributing the info is an interesting point, tripwolf has deep integration with facebook where it is possible to share information with friends. With that said the future of travel is social and peer to peer marketing.
“if we could get professional writers contributing to community driven sites like WikiTravel and finding ways to still make a living, that would be great… but unlikely.”
I also think it’ s unlikely.. however not because they will not do it since it’ s not money-rewarding but I guess for other reasons. My bet would be that:
- personnally when reading guide books, I (and I guess other readers) refer to the brand (for example: lonelyplanet, or National Geographic for their wonderful photos)… I usually don’ t remember the name of the author
- on the other hand, general understanding(I might be wrong but I’ d be interested in having some studies results about how people understqnd UGC) is that user generated contents is mainly about non-professional writers … So I guess having professional writers in a UGC model will denaturate the system and will probably be seen as PR people joining the ride