Ideas: The Trouble of Success. Growing pains at Lonely Planet?
// June 3rd, 2008 // Ideas Series
This is a new series for the blog. I’d love to be a futurologist, you can just chat some stuff about the future that you think up in the shower. Be sure that all your predictions can’t start until after you die, then you can never be proved wrong. Perfect.
So in these segments I can share some of the ideas cluttering up my grey matter. Usually it’s my friends that have to listen to me rambling about some great (but actually terrible) business idea that I’ve had. Or me bitching about an existing business which of course is run by shaved monkeys, who aren’t even qualified enough to exhale, never mind run a business. I could run it a million times better. Of course I never will, cos I’m a chicken.
Basically this series can act as soundboard for me to stop boring my friends with “wouldn’t it be great if – cinemas had dynamic pricing? google made cheese?” type ramblings.
Today I’m going to talk about the Lonely Planet travel books series. As a pretty regular traveller, and having just completed 4 months in Asia, I’m very familiar and frustrated with the Lonely Planet series. To be honest they feel like dinosaurs, the next Encyclopedia Britannica, at least they will be if they don’t adapt their business model soon. But I’m totally bought in to the concept of travel advice books, if done right. This makes me doubly frustrated with Lonely Planet who seem to mostly do it wrong in my opinion.
So what is the problem with Lonely Planet?
Continue Reading The Trouble of Success
Well, let me explain to you the current situation that we found as we travelled through Asia (China, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia). It might not be the same the world over. We found that about 80% of backpacker carried a Lonely Planet. Those that don’t already have one, are offered a fake photocopied one at least 15 times a day by kids on the street for anywhere from $2-10. There are only so many times you can say no to disabled, orphaned streetkids trying to make a buck selling you a useful book for about 1/20 of the price you’d pay back home. So after a while everyone is using the Lonely planet, and so ends up trying the same hotels, restaurants, bars, going to the same attractions. Lonely Planet call their Asia book the “yellow bible”, I’d agree that you might feel like Mary or Joseph finding all their recommended inns full of Lonely Planet toting “independent backpackers” and ending up sleeping in a stable with a donkey under the stars.
Firstly, they’re a victim of their own success. Every business needs to re-evaluate who they are and what they stand for every few years. A lot can change it that time. I remember we did a big six month project at Spreadshirt looking at a brand roadmap for the future, and asking our staff and customers what Spreadshirt was to them. Turns out it wasn’t what we thought we were. One day you’re a 5 man start-up working from a garage, then you’re a market leading mid-sized company of 300+ people. So you have to revisit your brand, messaging and product positioning to fit that. If you don’t then you’ll find that your success starts to undermine the values with which you created the organisation. I think that is what is happening at Lonely Planet.
To begin with Lonely Planet was:
- started by a couple after experiencing frustration finding travel information whilst backpacking.
- charting the unexplored, off the beaten track destinations. Condensing hard to find information.
But times have changes. Now:
- They’re now selling about 6 million books a year in a competitive, some would say, saturated market.
- The Internet came, and conquered. It might not be fast, but you can’t move for Internet Cafes in most of the countries we visited. With it arrived sites like Tripadvisor or Hostelworld which we’ll talk about later. Asia is not remote anymore.
- The world now has budget airlines, mass migration, the European Union, one currency (the $), one language (english). Travelling is easier than ever before, you don’t have to rough it as standards are advancing so fast. The number of uncharted destinations is falling rapidly.
- Now businesses proudly announce that they are “not in the lonely planet”, or will show you “what’s not in the lonely planet”, to cater to travelers who want to re-discover that sense of adventure away from the masses. Which is apparently what the Lonely Planet will do for you if you read the back of their books. Leading me back to the importance of re-evaluating your brands messaging periodically. You see it a lot with IT companies, one minute their young and cool, the next they’ve flipped to Google. At that point you have to accept that you aren’t the same company anymore, that people will call you “sell-outs”. If you still try and act small and independent you’ll fail. As Bill Gates said you can only be cool once.
This is the blurb on the back of the SE Asia on a shoestring book that sitting in my bookshelf
“Feel like sunning yourself on a deserted, white sand beach? Picture yourself having tea with a remote hilltribe? Lonely Planet is best for curious and independent-minded travellers”
Brand Promise: Freedom, the adventure lovers choice
Reality: Lonely Planet attractions and hotels book up the fastest. You’ll see people carrying it everywhere, all going to the same museums, trying to check into the same hotels following the same recommended itineraries. It’s as adventurous as egg and chips. If it’s in Lonely Planet, it’s no longer remote.
Brand Promise: Find you hidden, empty beaches, secret parties
Reality: You might find an empty spot on your Lonely Planet recommended beach, check by the toilets or under a rock. For a real empty beach, just ask a local or check the Internet.
Brand Promise: Regularly updated, meticulously researched
Reality: New issue every two or three years.? In the age of the Internet?! Asia changes right in front of your eyes, looking out across a sea of cranes and development in a booming country like Vietnam (with one of the fastest growing economies in the world), the place is changing daily. We met more than a few hotel owners who said LP come to town every two or three years stay for a day or two and move on. One of their writers admitted that they have never even visited the countries they wrote about, writing a Columbia guide from their flat in San Francisco “I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”
Once a business is in the Lonely Planet it is guaranteed to be near full for a few years, which is why quite a few get quickly sold. So it has carte blanche to do pretty much whatever the hell it wants for a few years. They’re goldmines. In the meantime the places that didn’t get write-ups, or only just opened have to raise their game and find other ways to compete. We found that hostels and hotels not in the LP were usually cleaner, newer, quieter and usually cheaper. The standards in hotels opened in the past year or so are vastly superior to the stalwarts featured in LP since the mid-90’s.
Where possible we used Hostelworld for our bookings. For example, say you know you’ll be in Bangkok in a couple of days. Would you rather trust the thoughts of one person who may have stayed there, or might have just looked round the place, at some unspecified point in the last few years. Or lets take one of my favourite hostels “sitting on the city walls” in Beijing, where you can trust the views of 127 reviewers giving it an average satisfaction rating of 96% (which means 127 people found it almost perfect), all written in the past six months (any older than that aren’t shown). Reviews like:
“Chantal from Netherlands stayed here on 30th May 2008 – Rated it 93%
Female 18-24
This is one of the best hostels I stayed at in China! It’s worth the little bit of extra money. Whenever you want to go somewhere, staff helps you by writing down the Chinese address (for the taxi driver). The beds in this hostel are super comfortable (got 2 pillows!!) and the atmosphere is really good.”
“Matthew from Norway stayed here on 26th May 2008 – Rated it 100%
You won’t find a hostel with more character than this one! In addition it has a great location and offers local cooked food and mega cheap beer. Furthermore the Staff are amazing and so helpful… You won’t find any better in Beijing, China, Asia and maybe the world : )
The top one is from two days ago! Chances are someone my age stayed there two days ago and loved it, I probably will as well. Plus as it’s aggregating the opinions of hundreds of people. So the odds that my opinion of “value for money” matching their aggregated view of “value for money” is likely to be higher than that of the one guy who wrote the review for the Lonely Planet. They call that the wisdom of crowds.
The other reason why Hostelworld works is it gives a little power back to the traveller. The hotel owners know that their % score will determine future bookings, so there’s a direct, strong financial incentive to get it right. Which is why a few times hotel owners asked us to review them, or if they treated us well to make sure we gave them a nice review on the site. Which we always did.
Lonely Planet in the future?
Well, I think in the current format they’re a dinosaur. The two things I’d like to see added:
1. Shift the focus from books to secure online reviews.
As everyone is pirating your books anyway and selling photocopies for $2, it’s time for a new business model, or give an incentive to buy the real thing. How about you start the one and only backpacker review site, similar to Tripadvisor. With the Lonely Planets reader-base and user-base from Thorn Tree (their online community), you could fill this up in no time. In the back of the book give away “experience vouchers”. These are a voucher with a unique code (like travellers cheques) handed to an experience provider – hotel, spa, boat tour company etc. This would invite them to create an experience ticket on the site, and an email to the backpacker to confirm what they are about to book eg
- Hotel name
- Room Type
- Date
How will that help?
The backpacker now has some power to honestly review their experience of that service. This will result in the service provider being less keen to treat them badly, or like a walking ATM. The backpacker feels more secure. What if they don’t accept the vouchers? That’s fine, they would work like a quality seal “this hostel accepts LP Experience Vouchers”. As usage increased, and backpackers demanded it, more service providers would be forced into accepting the scheme.
As you would need the unique code, Lonely Planet books have now become a distribution platform for the vouchers. The code stops the service getting flooded with fake reviews. You need genuine books to get genuine vouchers to use. As you would get through the vouchers quickly on a trip, you could offer refill packs of vouchers to the street kids, and unprivileged people who are selling photocopied versions of the book anyway to sell on the street to tourists for a few $’s.
2. Regular Editions
Every six months, one year maximum. Lonely Planet have the distribution experience, we have the knowledge. Crowdsourced editions are the answer. I’d rather get a list of the satisfaction %’s on Hostelworld than the current review format. But if you want to keep that, then include both. Give me your opinion, and the aggregated readers opinions. So I get the benefit of reading it offline on the plane, or in the jungle, and if necessary I can come back online and see if anythings changed lately and make a booking. Either provide the content online like wikitravel and then for a small fee a prepared, edited version as a pdf ready to be printed and bound locally by printing companies in the countries (the guy’s who are photocopying it anyway), or just print small runs of more frequent editions. Not only does that reduce the benefit of selling fake copies, its means even if I’m a version or two behind, that’s a year/18mnths which is better than the three years that might have elapsed since the review I’m reading now has been written.
I think combining the power of reviews on and offline, using the ideas above would keep the Lonely Planet relevant for years to come.
More of these to come. If you want to write something similar about a brand or product, have a great business idea you want to share it here, just mail me.
