Lonely Planet Pick & Mix Travel Guides
By Darren Cronian on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

I mentioned a while back that the travel guide book could be soon be non existent due to the internet and sites like Wikitravel and Lonely Planet online. Who wants to take a bulky travel guide with them when they are backpacking around Europe or Asia, not me.

Lonely Planet Pick & Mix Travel Guides

Today I received an email from Lonely Planet informing me of their Pick & Mix service which let’s travellers buy, download and print individual chapters pulled straight from their guidebooks. This means that we don’t have to lug around a heavy and they can get information anywhere we want.

They have started off with guides to Mexico, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean and to give people a chance to try Pick & Mix, the first chapter of each guide is free. Chapters are available prior to the release of the book and right now, the new editions of the Guatemala and Baja guides are available via Pick & Mix in advance of the book release.

The guides appear to come in PDF format so you’ll need to download the latest version of Acrobat Reader, but personally I think this is a great idea, and hope that new continents are added to the pick and mix service as I can see this being really useful for my trip to the USA and Canada.


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10 responses to “Lonely Planet Pick & Mix Travel Guides”

Kevin May | 21 August, 2007 at 10:49 pm

Lonely Planet have been doing quite a while. Weird that they would send out a press release again – maybe nobody is using it :-) .

Dorling Kindersley is also doing it.

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Darren Cronian | 22 August, 2007 at 1:24 pm

Kev, it was more of an email than a press release, but got the impression it was a new service.

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tom hall | 23 August, 2007 at 12:21 am

Pick & Mix launched July 9, 2007, which to me seems less than ‘quite a while.’ Could you be confusing Pick & Mix with something else, Kev?

And since the launch, the response has been fantastic, even better than expected.

Tom Hall
Product Manager, Pick & Mix

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John | 23 August, 2007 at 12:57 pm

An interesting decision from Lonely Planet. Tom, do you have any concerns that the PDFs will start to do the rounds through BitTorrent etc?

On a slightly different subject, I recall a company which offered to bind bespoke guides – you selected which chapters interested you (e.g. museums but not nightclubs) and they sent a hard copy to you. I can’t remember the name offhand, and I don’t think it worked out as I have never heard any more about it.

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Lonely Planet Travel Guides A La Carte: Less Filling, Same Great Taste | 23 August, 2007 at 8:33 pm

[...] Rants Blog tips the cap to a new Lonely Planet service called Pick & Mix: Today I received an email from Lonely Planet [...]

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tom hall | 23 August, 2007 at 10:24 pm

John:

File-sharing and piracy are problems for us, even with our print guides. As you might imagine, there were many discussions and debates about these issues before launching Pick & Mix.

In the end we decided to simply ask that the chapters be used only for personal, non-commercial purposes, and put our faith in our travellers to do the right thing. But we’re keeping an eye out for misuse or piracy, as this is clearly a concern for us.

Cheers,

Tom
Product Manager, Pick & Mix

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Darren Cronian | 23 August, 2007 at 11:28 pm

John, good question.

Tom, thanks for dropping by and answering questions.

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TG | 30 August, 2007 at 10:17 am

We took the Lonely Planet Guide for South America with us on long journey recently and I must say that I was disappointed to say the least. I don’t know how things work at LP, but the suggestions in Peru and Lima was off the charts. We followed the guide to some of the nicer hotels, but they were all crap and extremely expensive. We always found some nicer ones at a lower cost.

I don’t want to pick particular at LP as the guides have been good in other parts of the World, it’s just the South American onces that are hmmm “not good” in my book.

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Bob | 2 July, 2008 at 8:46 pm

Hi,

Could anyone tell the differences between LP and wikitravel.org? I am currently working on a paper on this.

Cheers,

Bob

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Darren Cronian | 3 July, 2008 at 7:21 am

@ Bob

Lonely Planet guides are written by travel writters, where as Wiki Travel guides can be edited by just about everyone who has visited that destination.

Hope this helps

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