Those hoping a strategic review by the BBC of core services and involvement in other commercial services will see the end of its interest in Lonely Planet will be disappointed.

Officials have moved quickly today to dispel speculation that the broadcast giant will dispose of its 75% share of Lonely Planet, a stake bought in hugely controversial circumstances in October 2007.

One of the areas which has ruffled the feathers of travel content producers around the world over the intervening period has centred on whether the BBC will use Lonely Planet content on its site, and vice versa.

The BBC has continually stressed that its ownership of Lonely Planet is through its commercial division BBC Worldwide, rather than from the central, publicly funded pot of revenue.

The latest review will concentrate on existing and UK-based services such as its niche radio stations 6 Music and Asian Network and some areas of its web offering.

An official says its business as usual for BBC Worldwide’s interest in Lonely Planet.

However, although there is a growing list of Lonely Planet magazines being rolled out around the world (a launch in France this week joins franchise titles in Brazil and India), content is not due to be included on the Lonely Planet website.

A further six magazines, including Argentina and Singapore, will be launched this year.

This week will probably see the launch of Apple’s Tablet – the iSlate (I had backed iTablet as the name but apparently there were copyright issues). So iSlate it is.

The unveiling of the product will give a big boost to the eReader category and resulting adoption.

Lazard Freres analyst Colin Sebastian has done an excellent research piece on the Tablet/Slate/eReader Market in his regular subscriber bulletin.

While reading his analysis I pondered whether or not the adoption of eReaders is a good or bad thing for the travel market.

In general, one could think that this is really good and valuable. A single Kindle or Nook or iSlate of the size of a single Lonely Planet guide book sounds lit a good idea. And it has convergence written all over it.

One of the core principals of the eReader is that it is lightly connected.

However, Kindle is not that great in many parts of the country and sometimes useless in the place you need it most – outside the USA.

I am sure however that this will get fixed but will you as the punter user be prepared to tote yet another device and deal with yet another set of connectivity issues?

Further, how rugged will it be? For serious leisure adventurers (largely American, but there are a good number of Brit and German types) the dog eared post-it note covered Lonely Planet or other guide book is part of the traveller kit!

However, I think that this will take some time. An eReader will not likely be the primary item that someone takes with them on a trip.

It will be an added tote to the Crackberry/iPhone or Netbook or light laptop. The statistics I have seen of the number of people who now sneak a peak to their email while on holiday is no longer a minor issue – its accepted.

Yes, we are all serially sad people and continually maintaining our connectivity to the real and pseudo social worlds is now a way of life.

Somehow, I believe that the eReader market will be a short lived step along the way.

Like sat-navs (GPS receivers for the non-Brits). The price of sat-navs has fallen so low that they are an accepted appliance, but already most Smartphones have GDS capabilities (with Nokia the latest to market, with its free version).

For Crackberry and iPhones and now Google Android devices, this is pretty useful.

I still believe we will coalesce around two form factors – the full functioned laptop and the smartphone device.

There will be a market for iPods and other specialist niche products, but for the rest of us it may just be a passing fad with a fairly short lifespan.

Roll on digital paper… Products like Que and Skiff which address the form factor may be worth waiting for.

At the moment they are a tad pricey. So I will watch and wait. However if someone wants to send me the first color Kindle or an iSlate… I wont say no.

I might even buy one for the coolness factor!

Deals publisher Travelzoo has lined up five partners to become the first in the UK to join its new Travelzoo Network.

Simonseeks, AOL Travel, Lonely Planet, VisitBritain and Skyscanner are five of the high profile brands to take the new widget for their site, featuring Travelzoo-sourced travel deals relevant to the existing content.

The launch of Travelzoo Network in the UK (and expected around Europe over the coming months) follows a similar project introduced into the US and joins its existing newsletter service and on-site publishing of deals.

Travelzoo denies that the launch of an ad network indicates that it is reaching a saturation point in the number of potential subscribers to its existing – and successful – weekly newsletter product and needs to diversify.

The new network sees a 50-50 revenue share between Travelzoo and advertisers every time a user clicks on a link within the hosted site.

Existing advertisers are given an opt-out of the service.

Travel Network Europe vice president Melanie Bower says “very few” advertisers have asked to be removed from the system, although she admits that some smaller travel firms will watch how their allocated advertising budget holds up if clicks from the partner sites rapidly increase in volume.

The ownership structure of Lonely Planet seems to trigger all manner of angst and hand-wringing, especially from the mainstream media in the UK and in particular from the BBC-hating Rupert Murdoch-owned press.

Our article yesterday from Tim Hughes gave a number of recommendations to those at top of Lonely Planet for what they should next given that digital seems to be huge focus.

But what does the BBC have to say about its troublesome (from a corporate  perspective) cousin and the continued criticism it receives from other media players?

First of all it continually stresses that it is BBC Worldwide (the corporation’s commercial arm) that owns 75% of Lonely Planet, rather than being funded by the UK TV licence fee payer.

NB: The other 25% is owned by the publisher’s founders, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who have decided not to sell their stake in the company, thus prompting the recent coverage as to whether the BBC should sell the company.

The BBC says it does not intend to sell Lonely Planet any time soon, therefore adding more fuel to the antis but perhaps more interestingly – to those that don’t actually care about the ownership – it is pressing ahead with plans for more digital integration between the two organisations and other initiatives.

This falls into a number of key areas:

The corporation is keen for Lonely Planet to push its mobile platform projects even further, primarily because the mobile device is the de facto gadget of choice for budget travellers (LP’s bread and butter) and all content could and should be available. This would also include developing new mobile services.

BBC has reams of travel programming which it says will soon be available on the Lonely Planet website. A fraction of the 3,000-odd hours have so far been digitised and transferred. One presumes digital video content will be integrated the other way eventually.

In short, the BBC doesn’t appear to be wanting to let go of Lonely Planet – despite the protestations of countless other media outlets – and clearly sees it as a strategic asset which, handily, will provide it with digital content and give it another distribution channel.

I am always on the watch for news items on Lonely Planet.

Like many children of the 70s and 80s, I have powerful and joyful memories of trips that consisted of a backpack, a round the world ticket and a Lonely Planet book.

In a time before email, GPS and mobile phones, Lonely Planet was the way to navigate your way around your lost youth.

Most memorable for me were trips to Europe in 1990, Morocco in 1993 and Malaysia in 1994.

A piece two weeks ago in The Australian newspaper (Rupert Murdoch-owned paper in Australia) called Lonely Planet goes into new orbit had me once again thinking about the potential for this still powerful travel brand in online travel discovery, recommendation and search.

The article is an interview by Aussie journo Geoff Elliott with the newish Lonely Planet chief executive Matt Goldberg.

Goldberg joined Lonely Planet in early March 2009 after a career at Dow Jones-The Wall Street Journal (now owned by Murdoch).

If you have been following the Lonely Planet story, we have just passed the two-year anniversary of BBC Worldwide (commercial arm of the BBC) purchasing 75% of Lonely Planet from the founders (Wheeler family).

The sale was seen by many (including me) as a chance for Lonely Planet to have a mulligan/do over/start afresh online push.

Prior to Goldberg joining the company there was plenty of activity online.

In 2008 there were a string of announcements like the following:

• Launching a channel on Youtube.
• Launching a mobile site in Australia.
• Joining up with Expedia and Hostelworld for joint accommodation sales.
• Launching an API to provide direct connectivity to reviews and content.

With Goldberg in place, the relentless push continued for LP to make their guidebook content available in different places.

Here are some of the announcements from 2009:

• A store has opened at Sydney Airport.
• Apps and guidebooks are all over the iTunes App store (have heard claims of 300,000 downloads).
• Chapters and books can be Pick’n Mixed and downloaded on Kindles.
• Has played around with Google Wave.

More generally, there is the Thorn Tree travel forum which continues to track hundreds of thousands of topics.

In his interview, Goldberg made it clear that he has plans that are “broader than being the largest guidebook publisher in the world”.

He wants to be “the first and last source of information tools and services that inspire and enable people to experience the world by getting to the heart of the place”.

This is the right goal and points to the very strong progress the company has made under Goldberg from the online low points of 2006 and early 2007.

But to achieve this goal, they need to do even more to “rip the cover off the guidebook” and increase their distribution, brand and customer message.

By that I mean and recommend the following:

1. Content Expansion: Make more and more of the content currently only available in books available online with the aim of being the number one organic search results for every major destination search item.  It might hurt some book sales but winning in organic search will be more valuable long term;
2. Open Syndication: Increase syndication capabilities by allowing bloggers, writers, transaction sites, Facebook pages and more to access content material is an open way. Similar to point #1 above, it might cost a few book sales but being the social network content source of choice will be more valuable long term.
3. Facilitate and Make EveryYou Recommendations: Invest in recommendation technology to allow the community forums and information to be combined with the editorial content, booking behaviour and other data available to put Lonely Planet at the forefront of the development of specific and targeted recommendations of one based on the unique combination of desires, needs and interests of each individual at any moment in time.  See My EveryYou concept. It will cost money and development time but the future of inspiration and content sites are targeted recommendations.

What do you think?  Is the vision from the new CEO right?  Do my recommendations add or detract?  What else would you do with LP to continue their online revolution?

PS – If you would like more background on Lonely Planet, then now we have it.

Thanks to their majority ownership by the BBC, we are able to get access to more information on them care of the BBC Worldwide annual review document (PDF here).

Here are some extracts from that document;

Results

• Sales Lonely Planet – 2009 (£128.1m) vs 2008 (£141.7m)
• Profit/Loss on Trading- 2009 (loss of  £3.3m) vs 2008 (loss of £0.1m)

Couple of quotes along with the results

“…the economic downturn…severely affected the travel market with travel guidebook sales falling by 18.1% in the UK, A Australia and the US (Bookscan).”

“The significant investment in digital activities helped increase digital revenues to £4.9 million (£2.3 million 2007/08), but also increased losses to £3.6million (£3.2 million 2007/08).”

The majority of revenues still come from book publishing, and so the decline in worldwide travel book sales has had a considerable impact on Lonely Planet.

Publishing and licensing profits in 2008/09 were significantly lower at £0.3 million compared with £4.4 million for the six months under BBC Worldwide ownership in 2007/08.

It goes on:

“However, the brand’s inherent robustness, plus the introduction of a new series – US Trips – and new editions – Hawaii Guides, Country Guides – enabled the business to maintain market share and, in some key territories, including the US and UK, to increase it. The 2008/09 figures also include restructuring costs that will reduce operating costs in the future.”

Google Wave may not be setting the world on fire as much as Google hoped given that its current lack of integration into Gmail is an annoying stumbling block and invites are taking a while to filter through.

But this hasn’t stopped some inquisitive types playing around with it during its closed beta phase and integrating existing functionality and tools into the system.

Lonely Planet is one such travel brand which has given it a serious look and has come up with quite an interesting proposition.

The demo above shows how Lonely Planet is using its database of information to feed products and points of interest into a Wave which can then be passed between one or more people.