Twenty-five years ago I was assistant to a senior publisher at Penguin Books who was responsible, as part of his portfolio, for the Time Out City Guide series. Once every few weeks we met up with Time Out either at the Penguin offices in Wrights Lane or at their offices on Tottenham Court Road to discuss forthcoming titles, look at sales figures and iron out (or apologise for) any distribution hiccups.
At the time there were loads of competing series of travel guidebooks, each with its own particular niche or audience focus. Lonely Planet was for the long haul backpackers, Fodor’s was for Americans, Eyewitness Guides were for those who liked to look at pictures and the Time Out guides were for those who wanted to know where the locals ate and drank so that they could enjoy an authentically hip city break.
Of course everyone involved in travel publishing knew that the internet was coming but there was a hubristic confidence that the best offline brands would also thrive online and that it was the high street travel agents - those nearly forgotten gatekeepers of flight and hotel bookings - who would be ‘disintermediated’ by online fledglings.
I don’t remember any emergency meetings being called when TripAdvisor launched in late 2000 and by the time it was bought by Expedia five years later I’d moved on at Penguin and was apologising for poor sales of ebooks rather than travel guides. Google Maps launched the same year and in 2007 added user-generated reviews to its maps, allowing people to rate their experience not only of hotels and restaurants but also of beaches, parks, museums and bus stops. By the time AirBnB launched in 2008 the complete customer journey, from research to booking to post-trip feedback, could be accomplished online with internet-enabled mobile phones allowing for on-the-ground exploration and navigation.
Being hoarders, especially of books, we’ve got a shelf of travel guides at home though they haven’t been touched in a while. The most recent is the Routard guide to Morocco, bought for a family holiday in 2015. In fact all of the post-2008 books are from Le Guide du Routard (‘The Backpackers Guide’), bought by my French wife who has a jingoistic belief that they offer more tasteful hotel and restaurant recommendations than their Anglocentric equivalents.
On that trip (our best ever family holiday) we spent a few days in Marrakech, a few days on the road driving across the Atlas mountains and a few days in Essaouira, using the guidebook throughout to find restaurants and the odd hammam. While we had wifi in our riad and later in a hotel, using our phones when out and about would at that time have been unreliable and pricey. But when we recently returned to Marrakech for a few days, we connected to fast local networks using eSims, experienced flawless coverage throughout our stay and left the guidebook at home in London.
A few weeks ago we began planning a summer holiday to Turkey, a country we know very little about. Not knowing where to start I picked up the 2024 Lonely Planet guide from my local library. It’s been a long time since I used a guidebook rather than the internet to research a place, but I was still disappointed at the shallowness of the printed pool of information. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised - Turkey is after all a big place. But towns with significant tourist interest and infrastructure didn’t get a mention in the guidebook and the brief descriptions of what was there gave me no sense of what it might be like to stay for a week or two. After a very quick scan I gave up on the book and turned back to the web, getting some general information from google searches, colour and narrative from blogs and newspaper features and finding accommodation on AirBnB.
So, in 2025, who are printed guidebooks for? Are people more worried about having their phones snatched out of their hands than embarrassed to walk around holding a Rough Guide? There was a time when something that was committed to print had more credibility than the online equivalent, but that was a long time ago and there surely can be few holdouts today. And why would anyone rely on a guidebook that is more than a year or two old? Certainly a guidebook printed before covid cannot be considered any sort of reliable source.
The Time Out City Guides stopped being printed in 2019, though Rough Guides and Lonely Planet and others are still available. I’m thinking about freeing up some shelf space and getting rid of our small collection but it is nice to occasionally glance at the shelf and remember some of the places I’ve been and some of the adventures I’ve had. Ironically then, while guidebooks were once portals to new experiences, today they are largely redundant, no more than souvenirs of long-faded suntans.
