David Vanderhoef was concerned about his guidebook to Kenya. A 39-year-old former bar manager from Connecticut, Vanderhoef had been on a grand world tour for several years with his partner when he picked up the latest guidebook from Lonely Planet, the legendary travel company, ahead of his trip in October.
That year's edition was only about half as long as the 2018 version he also owned. Hotel and restaurant listings, store hours, bus routes, and other swaths of content historically found in Lonely Planet's meticulously researched guides were either significantly pared down or slashed entirely. In their place were a lot more photos.
More alarming to Vanderhoef, the new book made almost no mention of safety or crime.
"Even the staunchest Kenyan patriot will readily admit that one of the country's biggest problems is crime," the 2018 edition said. It extensively warned travelers of everything from carjackings to "violent armed robbery" and featured detailed tips on avoiding "dangers and annoyances." The 2024 edition omitted almost all of these warnings. It mentioned the word "crime" only three times in the space of 107,000 words, one of them in the context of where to buy good crime fiction. Excised, too, were references to official security guidance from Western governments — despite the fact that parts of the country are under US State Department Level 4 "do not travel" restrictions due to the resurgent Al-Shabaab militant group and the risk of kidnapping.
"Safety is a really important thing to us when we're traveling because it can be really unsafe out there," Vanderhoef tells me. "A big problem with travel in general is trying to beautify travel, which is happening on Instagram. But it's happening now on Lonely Planet, and it's not good."
Founded in the 1970s, Lonely Planet has long been an icon of travel — the blue-spined backpackers' holy text that has provided generations of readers with invaluable lists of the best places to eat, sleep, sightsee, and party throughout Earth, while providing a crash course in local history and culture. "The one thing you always had to have to go to a country — first thing on your list after your backpack, basically, and your passport — was a Lonely Planet," David Zetlamb, a 55-year-old Californian academic living in Amsterdam, says.
But over the past decade or so, the storied brand has lost its way. It's one of numerous media properties that have tried to pivot in the face of the internet — from Encyclopedia Britannica's hard turn toward artificial intelligence to the Sports Illustrated brand's second life as a ticket seller and sports stadium name. Lonely Planet has bounced between various owners, trying myriad strategies to stay relevant. There have been multiple ill-fated apps, a TV show, credit card tie-ins, even an AI-powered trip planner — and, most recently, a radically redesigned, leaner guidebook that has raised hackles among longtime fans. Meanwhile, its digital competitors, including Tripadvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps, and legions of travel bloggers and influencers have not only eaten Lonely Planet's lunch but also reshaped how humanity conceives of travel.
Lonely Planet's slow, strange decline and the accompanying shift in travel media may stand as a parable for all our lives: The internet has reshaped how people find information and make decisions, disempowering the old sources of authority and uplifting independent voices — and not always for the better.
"When I was a young man, I would backpack through Europe and, of course, everyone was carrying this Lonely Planet guidebook, and it was a brick-sized travel bible," says Tim Hornyak, a Tokyo-based writer who contributed to several Lonely Planet guidebooks, including on Japan and South Korea, in the 2000s. "Naturally there was a cachet — 'Oh, you're a Lonely Planet author. Wow, that must be such an interesting job!' And it was. But it's a lot of grunt work."
Created in 1973 by Tony and Maureen Wheeler, a British-Australian couple then in their early 20s, Lonely Planet became an indispensable part of any budget-conscious traveler's vacation planning. It almost single-handedly popularized the concept of backpacking. As of 2007, it had sold more than 80 million books. It was so popular it created the "Lonely Planet effect," in which any out-of-the-way spot, upon being featured in the guidebook, was said to become immediately swamped with tourists, jack up its prices, and lose its hidden charm.
<es-blockquote data-styles="pullquote-breakout" data-quote="We weren't the Murdochs. It wasn't going to be a family dynasty." data-quote-updated="true" data-source="Lonely Planet cofounder Tony Wheeler" data-source-updated="true">
We weren't the Murdochs. It wasn't going to be a family dynasty.Lonely Planet cofounder Tony Wheeler
</es-blockquote>
In 2007, the Wheelers finally decided to cash out, offloading the property to the BBC for a cool £130 million.
"We weren't the Murdochs. It wasn't going to be a family dynasty," Tony Wheeler, now 78, says. "In retrospect, we sort of left at just the right time, when the internet was going to have this huge influence on things. But we didn't see that."
Lo and behold, the "Instagram effect" would soon dwarf the Lonely Planet effect. Launched in 2009 and owned by Meta since 2011, the photo-sharing app helped transform how people decide where to go and how they experience the world. It encouraged travelers to reflexively document every moment of their trips, while contributing to the overtourism of hyped-up photo spots. Influencer content can also fill hyperniches that any single guidebook could never hope to serve — whether that's travel suggestions for parents with epileptic children or mountaineering guides for deaf people. Lonely Planet knew the existential threat the app posed: "Instagram has infiltrated the very core of travel; how people interact with places, where they choose to go and the art of telling travel tales," a Lonely Planet contributor once wrote on the company's blog.
Meanwhile, Lonely Planet also had to contend with the rest of the internet. In 2006, guidebook sales across the industry in the US totaled a reported 19 million. By 2019, they were just 6.9 million, Circana Bookscan found.
After just six years, the BBC offloaded Lonely Planet in 2013 for £50 million — an enormous loss — to a Kentucky tobacco tycoon named Brad Kelley. Kelley quickly raised eyebrows internally with his choice of CEO: Daniel Houghton, a then-24-year-old former photojournalist whom he'd hired to run his media holding company, NC2.
"You could argue that this is a bad time to get into the business," Houghton told Outside magazine the following year. "But I think otherwise. The best time to get into an industry is when it's in flux."
Over the next decade, Lonely Planet experimented with several different avenues. It launched one failed app, Guides, then another, Trips, which Fast Company described as "a Medium-meets-Instagram approach to travel reporting." It invested in digital media. "Everybody was running their own parts of the business but completely siloed," says a former senior employee who, like several former Lonely Planet employees who spoke to me for this story, asked to remain anonymous over concerns about professional consequences. "There was no overall vision. There was no overall strategy. There was no sense that we were working together."
In early 2019, Houghton exited the business, and Kelley replaced him with Luis Cabrera, a BCG consultant who had previously worked with the company. He promised to "reinvigorate" the brand as a "travel platform" with personalized content.
Then the pandemic halted the world's travel plans.
In 2020, industrywide guidebook sales plummeted by more than 40%. By some estimates, Lonely Planet laid off two-thirds of its workforce of several hundred. Its offices in London and Melbourne, Australia, were essentially shuttered.
That December, Red Ventures swooped in. The sprawling South Carolina-based media conglomerate, then valued at $11 billion, had been gobbling up an array of media brands, from Bankrate to CNET. It had a well-honed business model, with web articles driving readers toward lucrative partnerships and referrals — from The Points Guy encouraging users to sign up for credit cards to Healthline's deals with wellness companies.
"The social content and the web content is all there to funnel you into some sort of affiliate fee ecosystem," a former Red Ventures employee who has worked in travel media says. "That's their bread and butter."
<es-blockquote data-styles="pullquote-right" data-quote=""Lonely Planet finds itself unsure of its purpose," read a slide from a company all-hands meeting in 2021." data-quote-updated="true" data-source="Add source (optional)" data-source-updated="false">
"Lonely Planet finds itself unsure of its purpose," read a slide from a company all-hands meeting in 2021.
</es-blockquote>
But Lonely Planet was a different beast: For all its abortive web efforts, at its heart, it made and sold a physical product. Some Lonely Planet staffers chafed at a culture clash, from their new parent company's company's laser focus on analytics and business to Red Ventures CEO Ric Elias' frequent reminders to his staff that he'd survived the "Miracle on the Hudson" US Airways water landing in 2009. (Red Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.)
Red Ventures knew it had its work cut out for it. "Lonely Planet finds itself unsure of its purpose," a slide from a company all-hands meeting in 2021 said. "As the world moved online, Lonely Planet struggled to replicate the success of its books in the digital space. Today, LP lacks a coherent identity."
Under the new leadership of Philippe von Borries, a cofounder of Refinery29, the media firm both explored initiatives and closed old endeavors, with an internal mission of becoming "the go-to discovery engine for travel." It tried out publishing premium long-form content and toyed with the idea of launching a hard paywall, though it never ultimately introduced one. It shuttered Guides, the smartphone app.
To the chagrin of die-hard Lonely Planet fans, the company also shut down the decades-old travel forum Thorn Tree in late 2022. Though popular with readers, it had been an albatross inside Lonely Planet long before Red Ventures — not generating much revenue and occasionally attracting problematic conversations about sex tourism, drugs, and other deeply unsavory travel-adjacent topics.
Today, Lonely Planet has about 3.3 million followers on Instagram. It's a respectable following — but individual travel bloggers, including Murad Osmann (3.2 million) and Jennifer Tuffen (2.6 million), can handily rack up similar numbers single-handedly. Throngs of travel-content creators big and small are stealing attention from Lonely Planet, and they're going about things very differently.
When I call Maddie Smith, a travel influencer from the Washington, DC, area, she's planning for a "girls trip" to Croatia with a handful of her 230,000-plus Instagram followers. She's one of a new breed that doesn't just make media about vacations — but also sells them.
"This book is a useless brochure. It's just a pointless picture book," an aggrieved one-star reviewer wrote for the latest Argentina edition.
Arturo Peña Romano Medina/Getty Images
Guidebooks and traditional travel journalists have typically had strict rules around accepting hospitality or freebies, lest they be seen as anything other than paragons of impartiality. ("The quote was 'nothing more expensive than a cup of tea,' or something like that," Leif Pettersen, a former Lonely Planet guidebook writer, says.) Influencers have not had the same compunctions — routinely striking partnerships and deals with hotels, local tourism boards, and other businesses to produce glitzy content on demand about locations.
"I have up to, I'd say, 30 revenue streams, any given month," Smith says.
Now there's a proliferation of services letting creators get paid more directly. Smith's Croatia trip is being organized through TrovaTrip, which enlists influencers as tour guides to paying travelers selected from their audiences. GetYourGuide offers holidaymakers various tickets, tours, classes, and other experiences, paying influencers for referrals. And Rexby, an Icelandic startup, lets creators either sell their own custom guidebooks or consult directly with tourists on their travel plans for a fee.
Smith got her start in food content before switching to travel; prior to the pivot, she hadn't traveled a whole lot, she says, and hadn't heard of the Lonely Planet brand before I emailed her asking to chat.
In the face of dwindling appetite for traditional travel content, legacy travel media is now also trying to get a slice of the pie from vacation sales. In 2022, Lonely Planet acquired Elsewhere, a holiday-planning startup, for an undisclosed amount and affixed "by Lonely Planet" branding to it — enticing customers to "cut through the noise with tailored recommendations based on our boots-on-the-ground knowledge and personal connections."
Rough Guides, a longtime competitor to Lonely Planet, also offers a vacation-planning service that promises to deliver "a trip based truly on your preferences and created by a local travel specialist, including all aspects of your travel in the destination: hotels, transportation and unique excursions." And The Outdoor Journal, a glossy travel magazine, is building Outdoor Voyage, a platform for booking boutique "adventures."
In 2023, Lonely Planet had yet another leadership shake-up. Von Borries left Red Ventures, and Paul Yanover — the former CEO of Fandango and a longtime Disney exec before that — stepped in.
Around the same time, the company overhauled its guidebooks — introducing more photos and prospective itineraries, while stripping away much of the content traditionally found in them. In the most recent edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Brazil, for example, the page count shrank from 734 to 592. Nearly every page has a photo, maps are simplified, and it features frequent mini-interviews with locals. Restaurant recommendations are dialed back, opening hours and other logistical details are largely removed, and museums and locations don't have the same depth of information as they did in the previous version. (These redesigned guidebooks are distinct from the brand's "Lonely Planet Experience" books, a series that debuted in 2022 and features magazine-style content, positioned as an "anti-guidebook.")
<es-blockquote data-styles="pullquote-breakout" data-quote="There has been a certain segment of the population turning back to the traditional sources because there's been this insane flood of crap on the internet." data-quote-updated="true" data-source="Pauline Frommer
" data-source-updated="true">
There has been a certain segment of the population turning back to the traditional sources because there's been this insane flood of crap on the internet.Pauline Frommer
</es-blockquote>
"In this world where people can just pull it up on Google or go to the company's website, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have it in a physical book that we can only change every two years," a former employee said of Lonely Planet's rationale for the changes.
The redesign hasn't been without pushback. Lonely Planet's books have historically been consistently well reviewed online, but reviews poured in on Amazon slamming many of the new guidebooks.
The 2023 edition of Madagascar has 3.1 stars out of five, compared with its predecessor's 4.6. "No idea what's happened to LP, but this book is really third rate at best," one reviewer wrote. That year's Brazil edition has 3.2 stars, while Argentina has 3.4.
"This book is a useless brochure," an aggrieved one-star reviewer wrote for the latest Argentina edition. "It's just a pointless picture book. It is an extraordinary achievement for a travel guidebook series to make its newest editions 1000% times less useful than older editions, but the pitiful new Lonely Planet books have actually managed to do this."
Tony Wheeler, the Lonely Planet cofounder, says that despite being out of the business for decades, he sometimes receives unsolicited complaints from customers who've bought newer guidebooks. "What disappoints me, in a way, and it disappoints a lot of people who use Lonely Planet books, or used to use them and don't find that they work the way they used to, is — I'm not going to say dumbed down, but yeah, I sort of mean that," he tells me.
For nearly 20 years now, Lonely Planet has grappled with a fundamental disconnect: It has an enviable archive of print content but no way to access much of it online apart from e-books. Under Red Ventures, the company has been talking for years about launching an app, perhaps with a subscription for unlimited access to content, to help users plan trips and build itineraries.
Last year, Red Ventures released Guide, a generative-AI-powered trip planner that uses Lonely Planet data. It's not clear how widely used it is, and it's fairly bare-bones — much of the information appears to be pulled from Google Reviews. It generates notable errors: When I asked for a trip to the Cotswolds, a scenic part of England, it encouraged me to book a science-themed bike tour of Valencia, Spain.
There are further headwinds to come. Red Ventures' empire has been built in part on savvy search engine optimization — figuring out the best way to climb the results on Google, then funneling users into profitable products like credit card referrals. But generative AI from the likes of OpenAI and Google itself threatens to produce a world in which far fewer people actually click through — imperiling the business model.
Still, for some, guidebooks remain a trusted one-stop shop that cuts through the noise of vacation planning. Guidebook sales are steadily growing across the industry from their pandemic lows, Circana found, reaching 5.7 million in 2024 — albeit still down from 2019's 6.9 million.
"We've had a good couple of years, partially because, I think, a lot of people are recognizing that a lot of what they read online is simply disguised marketing," Pauline Frommer, the editorial director of the Frommers guidebook brand, says. "There has been a certain segment of the population turning back to the traditional sources because there's been this insane flood of crap on the internet."
To Vanderhoef, the Connecticut traveler, Lonely Planet was once a real-life "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." "It was the ability to go into a foreign, strange place and have no idea where you are or what you're doing, but to know, 'OK, there's a good restaurant over here,' and it's a start," he says.
He recently moved to Portugal, buying a copy of Lonely Planet before he left, but he hasn't gotten around to opening it. When we email in our last follow-up, he's on the verge of taking a trip to Vienna. For both Vienna and Portugal, he's been relying on a combination of Google Maps, random search results, and online travel media.
"But my primary source of information," he says, "will likely be to simply ask people."
Rob Price is a senior correspondent for Business Insider, writing features about technology and society. You can contact him via Signal/WhatsApp at +1 650-636-6268 or email at rprice@businessinsider.com.
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