The End of the Travel Guide Book
By Darren Cronian on Thursday, March 1st, 2007

Kevin May, editor of Travolution, recently blogged about the tough times ahead for travel guide books – interesting points raised and I have to agree with him. I remember a time when, whenever I went on holiday I would buy a travel guide book, to get to know the destination and plan my trip.

The End of the Travel Guide Book

Nowadays, forget buying a book! I can find out about destinations via Lonely Planet online, Travel Wikipedia, and travel blogs. Why pay for a travel guide book when it’s free on the internet?

The advantage of a guide book is you can carry it around and not have to carry pieces of paper, but the cost of these books out weights that small annoyance. So, do you buy travel guides? What do you use to plan your holiday, or are you a I’ll see what is there when I arrive type of traveller?


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10 responses to “The End of the Travel Guide Book”

Craig McGinty | 1 March, 2007 at 2:41 pm

What really excites me is better/free WiFi access, both in cities and further a field, that allows you to hook up an iPhone or similar to the internet, then you don’t even need to print off a thing – bring it on ;-)

Craig

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TN Cornett | 1 March, 2007 at 6:44 pm

It’s easier to have it all in one package with a guide book. What I don’t like in a guide book is having all the information I am not interested in – side trips or museums I’m not going to.

By researching online and gathering your own information, you are essentially putting together your own guide book, which takes time, and you have to enjoy doing this.

The planning of a vacation is some of the most fun, so if you figured out a way to print out the information on small enough pages to take with you and compact enough to fit in a backpack, it would be a fun way to go.

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Darren Cronian | 1 March, 2007 at 11:03 pm

Craig, I’m just writing tomorrow’s blog post and it features WiFi.

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Karen Bryan | 2 March, 2007 at 10:45 am

I like to do a bit of research on my destination before I go and may just print out a few pages from various sources and put them in a plastic folder. I usually have several things I will prioritise on during my trip but I don’t want to be too structured. I want to leave some time just to wander around and soak up the local atmosphere.

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Darren Cronian | 2 March, 2007 at 2:12 pm

Yeah being too organised Karen can be boring.

I leave the first full day to get used to local area, and find my way around. Get used to the public transport system and find out where the local attractions are, web cafes etc.

BTW, will email you tonight about the missing posts. They were 3 in total that were deleted, and I’ve had the host company look into this – appears to be a MySQL database issue they had, so I’ll get the blog posts back on there this weekend.

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Markus | 3 March, 2007 at 6:23 am

I’ve not carried a travel guide in years. They are too bulky and full of information that I don’t need.

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Debbie | 4 March, 2007 at 11:53 pm

I have never bought a guide book. I usually wait until I get there and then buy a map or go to tourist information for leaflets.

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Karl | 6 March, 2007 at 12:19 am

I agree with Debbie. Guide books are too heavy.

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To be frank | 2 August, 2007 at 4:30 pm

You’re assuming that you can get connected everywhere, that you always want to look at things on a screen, that all travellers want to be always wired, or that they can afford it.

Also many people want to learn about the country they are travelling to in depth and quite frankly there are few blogs that research as much as any of the better guide books.

I personally don’t think they’re going to do die anytime soon.

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John Hunter | 1 January, 2010 at 5:07 pm

I still find guide books very useful. The internet resources are also great. The books I most use are hiking guide books. It is just very useful to have a few books in hand as I decide which hikes to go on. I often will have several picked out in advance but while I am on site I often make decisions on which to do. While it is getting more possible to get the internet while visiting national parks it is often still not available.

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