The future of travel publishing is the app

Travel guide publishing is the canary in the coal
mine for the printed book with sales down 38% in five years. If this rate of decline continues then the last LP or Rough Guide will be published in 7 years.

Spurred on by the recession and with people to choosing to use the internet to do their own research sales of printed travel guides can only continue to fall.

Let's face it lugging a travel guide book around with you is inconvenient.

The future of the travel guide is the app.

It has convenience combined with features impossible to do with the printed book:

• Point your phone at an interesting building and get its full history;
• automatically build an itinerary based on your preferences;
• get restaurant and hotel recommendations combined with discounts streamed to your phone for the area that you are standing;
• speak into your phone for automatic translation into the local language;
• and a whole host of social features that could make discovering new people as easy as finding new places.

Although the future of the printed travel guide book is bleak, the information that it contains is soon to liberated in a much more exciting way.

Posted via email from fakingIt