The travel industry is more diversified than ever before. So beware…

With nearly every travel booking site, or intermediary, providing one-stop shops for everything from airfare and room and board to transportation and tours, these sites aren’t only competing against each other.

They’re now competing against the suppliers themselves – airlines, hotels, rental car and tour companies.

Intermediaries are offering dynamic packages across suppliers, and competitive websites are investing in new features, such as online reviews, to keep travelers looking and booking on their site.

Meanwhile, suppliers are investing in their websites to capture more direct bookings, as well as investing in loyalty programs and other initiatives that help them reconnect with the customer.

And midst all this, consumers are taking advantage of their battle to please them.

Always on the prowl for the best deal, bargain hunters can make life in the travel industry difficult—especially for companies that can’t compete price-wise.

For them, brand loyalty is of particular importance. But how do you create and maintain brand loyalty when consumers have hundreds, if not thousands, of choices?

It’s all about user experience

By ensuring that visitors have a successful browsing and booking experience. Doing this requires speaking to individual customers’ needs by providing an optimized and personalized travel experience – across all digital touch-points.

In other words, if you please them, they will return.

Whether you’re a supplier or an intermediary, providing an optimized and personalized travel experience – across all digital touch-points – is critical to building and maintaining customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, many travelers today still encounter problems with the simplest of tasks on travel sites.

According to recent Forrester research, one in five leisure travelers encounter problems booking online. Fundamental tasks, such as completing, modifying or cancelling reservations, proved to be the most problematic for this group.

Start by asking yourself a few key questions:

• When a visitor comes to your site to plan a trip, are they able to effectively search for what they’re looking for?
• Do they abandon your site after the first set of trip results are displayed? Or do they get deep into the checkout process only to then bounce to do more research?
• Of those who do not complete the checkout process, can you identify any specific trends, such as getting stuck on a certain page or form before leaving?

A common problem in the online travel booking process is for a user to nearly complete the checkout process, only to bounce out of the funnel at the last minute to continue researching.

In this case, information that influences a traveler’s decision is likely being presented too late in the process, such as revealing hidden fees that result in a higher-than-quoted price.

What to do?

This is where multivariate testing can be used to determine which information should be presented up-front in the process – well before the visitor advances to the final stages of booking.

This type of testing can also determine whether presenting this information reduces overall conversion rates or has a negative impact on revenue.

Continuous A/B and Multivariate Testing (MVT) are key methods when it comes to optimizing websites and achieving specific behavioral results, such as converting browsers into buyers, reducing last-minute bounces, and so forth.

For example, by testing content and layout variations of the home page, search interface, and layout of search results, while also measuring the corresponding impact of each of those changes on engagement and bookings, you can determine which content and page layouts result more engaging experiences for site visitors, which ultimately leads to higher online revenue.

Testing with live visitors will provide the insight you need to determine why certain segments of visitors might abandon the process.

You also don’t want to ignore the fact that your website may need additional features to improve the customer experience.

For example, during the research phase, many travelers tend to consult Google Maps. Since maps can provide convenience to determine how close a hotel is to walk to a local attraction, or the types of restaurants available nearby – and are therefore helpful to someone planning travel – don’t force visitors to toggle between your site and Google.

Instead, try embedding a Google map directly into your site. This will keep visitors on your site and help them progress into the booking funnel.

Past traveler reviews are extremely influential on the decision to book. Knowing that online travel bookers rely on sites such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Lonely Planet for reviews and discussions, online travel bookers often consult these sites before pulling the “Book Now” trigger.

As with Google Maps, if your visitors are distracted by additional sites and pages, your abandon rate could suffer.

Try testing out integration of travel reviews from these reliable sources into the booking funnel to improve conversions.

By giving visitors information they are already looking for (the good, the bad and the ugly) you’re more likely to get—and keep—them as customers.

Conclusions

Of course, all of this is just the beginning. But in the end, it’s really about providing a seamless (and painless) online experience to help customers plan, book, and modify their trips.

Doing so will provide a deeper connection with consumers, as well as drive more online bookings, revenue, and customer loyalty.

NB: This is a guest article by Mark Simpson, president and founder of Maxymiser.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

The free app for iPhone and iPod touch was available today from the App Store, and downloads would be limited to the first 100,000 people for the beta.

Lonely Planet’s recommendations don’t get priority placement in the app, a Lonely Planet spokeswoman says, although it is branded Wenzani by Lonely Planet.

Wenzani is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lonely Planet.

Wenzani is a Zulu greetings for “what are you doing,” and the app covers recommendations on restaurants entertainment, events, shopping, hotels, and cultural activities, including those geared for kids.

“Wenzani’s technology presents the content according to context and relevancy, taking into consideration the user’s location and their social network so that the information is constantly uploaded while on the go” the company says. “Soon, Wenzani will filter by other factors such as weather, time of day and whether the user is a local or visitor so it becomes more tailored and relevant to the user’s needs in real time.”

Of course, Wenzani has the requesite social travel elements. Users can view friends recommendations, compile them or ask their friends questions.

“Like any platform, Wenzani offers publishers a chance to get their brand and content in front of consumers,” the spokeswoman says.

Asked about the business model among competitors, the spokeswoman says “later iterations of the guide may include monetization opportunities, from which our our partners will share revenue, but we’re still working out if and how that would happen.”

The free nature of the app represents a departure for Lonely Planet, which primarily offers paid apps for its various city and country guides.

However, that doesn’t preclude Wenzani eventually becoming a paid app once the limited public beta is completed.

Here’s a video explaining the app:

Introducing Wenzani from Wenzani on Vimeo.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

We are a team of three backpackers who met during a trip and decided to create a sharing service that would get our fellow backpackers out of the overcrowded “Lonely Planet Path”! Here’s who we are exactly :

• Antoine Heber-Suffrin, co-founder and CEO – discovered backpacking at age 18 during a 1 month Inter-Rail trip around Europe. He travelled in 21 countries to date and built strong relationships with backpackers he met on the road. He has a Masters’ degree in management and has worked on community websites in the entertainment industry.
• Kevin Creusy, co-founder and COO, is the most recent backpacker of the team. Kevin fell in love with backpacking three years ago, and has since backpacked 5 countries. He has a Masters degree in finance and is also front-end developer at Backpackmojo.
• Pierre Margueritte, co-founder and CTO, is a passionate traveller and photographer who enjoys revealing breathtaking sceneries using his cameras. He holds a Masters’degree in computer science and is the technical mind behind Backpackmojo.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

The company has been entirely funded through founder’s personal funds and family and fiends. We will soon begin a new round of financing to get our service better and available to more users.

What problem are you trying to solve?

The travel process, for backpackers and other tourists alike, can be divided into three main steps:

• the pre-travel inspiration process (where can I go? what can I do for my time and budget?)
• the travel itself (things I did, venues I attended, adventures I lived, people I met)
• the post-travel sharing process (friends want to see pictures and know what I’ve done, some want advice for an upcoming similar trip).

Two of these steps take place online: inspiration and sharing. They are annoying and time consuming because the current offer is not perfect: inspiration online, even with popular social networks such as TripAdvisor, is only efficient if you actually KNOW what you want to do (reviews of specific things like Hotels), but are not efficient if you want inspiration for an itinerary for instance.

For example, “I want to go to Peru for 30 days”, is the only information you should give a website to get inspiration on a 30 days trip to Peru.

The sharing process is also often limited to a photo album on Facebook, a letter to Lonely Planet to tell them what is out of date, and lots of emails from friends, who want to do a similar trip, in your inbox.

Blogs aren’t the solution because they’re too long, not well organized, and hard to find (someone on the web probably has a blog of your dream trip, but you’ll spend hours searching for it). There is a gold mine of expert travel experience that is lost because not properly addressed by the web.

Backpackmojo is an online platform that aims to solve these problems by being a pre-travel inspiration tool AND a post-travel sharing tool with a single innovative product: personal travel guides.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Backpackmojo is essentially a social platform where you can easily create, share and print professional-looking personal travel guides. The user simply enters his itinerary, and we generate the guide structure where each stop is a different chapter. The user can fill this structure with personal photos, reviews, tips and advices. Each guide can be downloaded as a PDF.

The guides are all available for free on the website and our search system by destination and trip length make them easy to find. The content of each guide is also aggregated in country/city/hotspot pages so that you can access all the information on a particular location on a single page.

Backpackmojo has partnerships with hostel booking platforms so that backpackers can spot popular hostel and book them directly on our site. You won’t find five-star hotels here, we’re dedicated to Budget travellers.

We also have a printo-o-demand service that gives people the opportunity to print their Guide in a professional-looking book and receive it at home. For our beta, each guide completed on Backpackmojo will be printed and sent to its author for free!

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

We are dedicated to the Backpacker community, a majority of which is aged 18-29 but being a backpacker is more a state of mind than an age question. This community is already huge, truly international and growing every year.

Youth travel is a phenomenon and around 170 million tourists each year are young travellers that are eager to share good tips with each other in order to avoid overcrowded tourist traps. We want to transfer this sharing dynamics online by disrupting a tool these travellers know well: the travel guide.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

As backpackers ourselves, a personal travel guide is something we’ve been dreaming of for years. Who doesn’t want to become a travel writer and see its name on a travel guide?

The backpackers we’ve asked were very interested by the two aspects of a personal travel guide: a nice Souvenir of your trip that you can keep on your bookshelf and the possibility to browse the different itineraries and tips of the community on the website. The idea seems to be appealing to our targeted users.

A week only after the launch we have amazing feedback from our new users. We are really proud of that.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

The business model is straightforward: we generate revenue from travel-related advertising, affiliation (booking hostels and flights from our partners) and print-on-demand (you can order the book version of the guide you create, sell it to friends and earn a commission on each sale).

We would also like to create a true collaborative guide book on each country, featuring itineraries, tips and reviews from popular members in the community: a guide book more relevant to Backpackers and always up to date.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strength:

• A unique product on the web, the first Social Network dedicated to Backpackers where you can create and print a professional-looking travel guide for your trips and feel like a professional travel writer.

Weaknesses:

• Completing a quality Guide is a long process for which it is difficult to maintain people fully committed.

Opportunities:

• The lack of qualified information for millions of Backpackers outside of Professional Guide books and aging forums. Most of the unique travel experiences are lost even if travellers would benefit from the tips on a whole trip.

Threats:

• The power of huge travel blog platforms will make it harder for us to educate people to this new way of sharing.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Every non-backpacker traveller who questions why people would possibly want to spend a few hours completing a nice travel guide for others.

While we know that backpackers share easily, we listened to these critics and turned our guides into personal souvenir album for you and your close friends that benefits the entire backpacking community.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

The success metric 12 months from now would be seeing a complete stranger holding a Backpackmojo Guide book in a foreign country!

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

The hotel-review publisher just got into the travel guide business as it launched free Mobile City Guides for 20 cities around the world on Android devices.

The apps include recommendations for walking tours, insider tips, ratings, reviews and information about a cities’ neighborhoods, culture, architecture, weather and transportation etc., all of which can be accessed offline to avoid roaming charges.

Interestingly, the city guide information combines recommendations from professionals — i.e. TripAdvisor Destination Experts — and travelers as the apps are synced with the latest TripAdvisor user reviews.

For example, the London City Guide provides information on restaurants, self-guided free tours, attractions, hotels and an interactive map.

There are 13 tours of London highlighted, with the half-day self-guided tour of East London boutiques choreographed via an interactive map and plotting stops at venues such as Duke of Uke for a quick ukelele fix and Brick Lane for its Indian, Pakistani and Bengali restaurants.

Each stop comes with a summary of area amenities and tips for enjoying your visit.

The guides are available for the following cities: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Florence, Hong Kong, Hawaii, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Orlando, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, Sydney, Tokyo, and Washington D.C.

The launch of mobile city guides represents an unexpected, but logical new business line for TripAdvisor, which can only further its global reach with this expansion of its mobile offerings.

There wasn’t any advertising immediately apparent in the city guides, but one can only imagine that it will eventually be in the works.

TripAdvisor websites already offer a “Things to Do” tab with lists of attractions and reviews, and TripAdvisor’s existing Hotels, Flights and Restaurants apps enable users to view nearby hotels and restaurants, but the city guides take all of this a step further.

“A tremendous complement to our popular TripAdvisor site app, these guides offer even more city detail, including itineraries and interactive walking tours,” says Adam Medros, TripAdvisor’s vice president of global product.

Travel guide publishers who offer paid apps likely won’t welcome the for-free status of TripAdvisor’s mobile city guides.

These travel guide publishers already compete against TripAdvisor in some ways, but now the fight is more direct.

TripAdvisor says it hopes to launch the Mobile City Guides for additional platforms, such as the iPhone, in the future.

Meanwhile, TripAdvisor announced that its mobile apps have reached a milestone — 10 million downloads.

And, to mark the occasion, TripAdvisor published an infographic detailing its global mobile footprint.

Details about San-Francisco-based Fourforty are sketchy although work on its first application, Wenzani, (where are you going in Zulu) is well underway with plans to launch in around a month.

BBC Worldwide, which acquired the remaining 25% in Lonely Planet for £42 million in February this year, will not have any equity in Fourforty.

In a recent interview, Lonely Planet CEO Matt Goldberg, said innovation required a particular mindset.

Fourforty’s aim is to develop next generation social mobile travel guides and in the interview Goldberg gave a clear idea of its focus:

“With the explosion of mobile and the scale of social, with a GPS in every smartphone, what does a guide look like? We’re going to launch the travel guide for the social generation.”

Lonely Planet already has experience in the mobile and social space with hundreds of mobile app editions of its guides available across different platforms.

Wenzani will include content from Lonely Planet as well as competitors.

Any developments from Fourforty will be on top of existing apps and not replace them.

NB: Hat-tip paidContent:UK

• So-called “experience sharing platform” Vayable is setting up shop in New York, its first location outside of home town San Francisco. The startup [TLabs Showcase - Vayable] has teamed with fellow Bay Area tech firm Airbnb to host a community event for potential new clients in New York on August 23.

• JAC Travel, the UK-based tour operator best known for its range of hotels online and inbound travel services, has recruited Naomi Reed from Lastminute.com. Previously head of supply at the Travelocity-owned European online travel agency, Reed is charged with growing JAC’s client base in the USA and Canada.

• Lonely Planet and Visa joined forces to create a travel microsite for the credit card giant, containing expert information on destinations and the best way to access money abroad. users can access advice on how to access their cash in 12 destinations around the world: Australia, China, Croatia, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, the UAE and Ukraine.

• Skyscanner introduces the first dedicated mobile version of its website this week. Engineers have created versions for Kindles, Android and iPhoWindows Mobile 7, Blackberry 6, Palm OS 1.43, Kindles, Android and iPhone. The metasearch engine aleeady has apps in the market for iPhone and Android devices.

Tony Wheeler and his wife Maureen started Lonely Planet in 1972, growing it to be the largest guidebook seller in the world and one of the most recognized brands in travel.

In February of this year, the couple completed their sale of Lonely Planet to BBC Worldwide for over $200 million.

But how did they grow from two people throwing notes together from a Southeast Asia honeymoon to a company worth over $200 million dollars? And how can we apply their lessons to our own companies?

I interviewed Tony Wheeler recently about launching the company and building it into something that went way beyond its early ideals.

Here are his ten tips on how you can build a company into a globally recognized travel brand:

1. Identify a gap that you can fill

Traveling around Asia, Tony and Maureen struggled to find information about where they were going to go and how they were going to get there. This was a clear gap that they could fill.

2.  Be first

While obviously easier said than done, don’t discount the importance of being first to market. Rough Guides was started around the same time as Lonely Planet and Tony credits being slightly ahead of it as a factor in its success.

3.  Shop your idea to the customer early

Before they were even finished with the first book, Tony went into a bookstore, told them what they were working on and they got their first order: 50 copies.

4.  Stay focused on your goal – be obsessive about it

Tony’s competitors “got into other things and other distractions”. Lonely Planet remained solely focused on guidebooks.

5. Do something you love

The enthusiasm you put into your product is going to be picked up by your customers, employees and partners.

TW: “When you have that enthusiasm, people tend to go along with you. They like what you do and want to do something similar.”

6. Don’t only start to do something you love, make sure to keep it that way

At Lonely Planet there were many times when it was led by its heart rather than the head. “This makes more sense than that because of money, but we didn’t to that, we did what we wanted to do.”

7. Focus on what you do best

Wheeler wasn’t going to be able to travel, write guidebooks and run the business. He found a business partner to keep things moving while he traveled and wrote the books.

8. When you’re on to something, your customers will let you know

At the beginning, Lonely Planet customers would send them letters and postcards.

TW: “You could tell how enthusiastic [the customers] were about what [we] were doing by the amount of time they put into it. People don’t sit down and write you a long letter of corrections and suggestions and ideas and so on, given that they’re making no return on this at all; they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart…they like what you’re doing, and they want to help out.”

9. Go niche to win

Lonely Planet started out with guidebooks to Southeast Asia, Nepal, Africa, Burma and Sri Lanka. These were up and coming destinations and not nearly as popular as Western Europe or the United States.

The company knew it was too small to compete in those destinations, so it focused on smaller books and areas the writer knew they could handle, and then grow from there.

10. Bet the bank at the right time

Bet the bank, but be strategic about it and make sure you have the experience under your belt to know that you can accomplish the task.

After knocking out smaller destinations with books that took six weeks to two months to research, the company decided that India was going to be their next book.

This was a massive project, however, with three teams and 12 months of research. The company had produced 17 books and India was the 18th. If it had tried to do it earlier, there is no way Lonely Planety could have found the time or the money.

Listen to the full interview with Wheeler:

You can also download the entire MP3 (right-click and then choose “Save Link As…”). Lastly, you can read the transcript.

NB: This is a guest article by Jason Demant, co-founder of Unanchor.com.

NB2: This interview was carried out before the latest round of redundancies at the company, now no longer under Wheeler’s ownership.

Headcount at the guidebook giant will be cut by nearly one in five  (17%) as a result of sweeping changes to the company following poor financial performance in recent months.

Around 70 people, mostly from the company’s digital division, will lose out as the company looks to recoup a massive AUS$13 million wiped off revenues as a result of the strength of Australian currency (which the company operates in) which skews the 80% of the revenues coming in from outside the country.

The company currently employs around 350 people in Australia (its headquarters are in Melbourne) and 100 elsewhere around the world but primarily in its London and California offices.

The vast majority of the remaining members of web team will now move to London and new roles will be created as a result of those not being able to make the huge personal switch to a new country.

An official says part of the reason to locate them to London is to bring the department closer to parent company BBC Worldwide following its purchase of the remaining shares from founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler last year.

There are no definitive plans as yet, but some integration or sharing of expertise and skills could be a possibility. Ties are already getting closer between the two, with BBC running Lonely Planet content on its non-UK website.

CEO Matt Goldberg has continually stressed how important digital is to the company as it looks to become a multi-channel publisher, but the latest development is the second time in the space of a year that the web folk have been on the receiving end of redundancies.

An official says there is “no change” in its overall strategy for the web with today’s redundancies as a result of the financial state of the company, declining print market, sluggish global economy and weak retail sector.

Hitting the UK this week and expected to find its way to the Yahoo Travel sites in France, Germany, Spain and Italy over the course of the next six months, the new design was introduced in the US during 2010.

As well as the travel search element (powered by Expedia since August 2010) given more prominence than in the previous version, content from Lonely Planet and WCities is streamed into new travel guides alongside editorial provided by the Yahoo Travel team.

The site is also trying to get more social, allowing users to add trip ideas and photos (via Yahoo-owned Flickr) into the trip planning part of the new site.

Visitors can also rate the photos and content added to the site as well as share around various social networks in the usual way.

Yahoo Travel has found itself battling with other travel portals and online travel agencies in recent years, slipping regularly in and out of the top ten UK travel sites with the likes of Skyscanner and Travelzoo.

NB: Yahoo has acknowledged that the redesigned site has a bug – the travel guide section has the US travel search module, rather than the UK partner system provided by Expedia. Oops.

Having worked in the publishing industry for over a decade as a designer, author and editor, I have witnessed some pretty swift transitions from old-style publishing to new.

We have all had to learn an awful lot very quickly. For the last year I have been working for both Rough Guides and DK Eyewitness Travel, and the learning curve got a whole lot steeper.

Coming from the world of books to the world of apps, the shift is not only focused on the different ways we use content and build products, we are also facing a very different kind of sales channel to the one we are all used to.

As customers, we all know that price is the most significant factor when we make decisions about a purchase.

Yes, desire, need, fashion and other forces play a part, but price, and our ability to instantly balance that price against value, is king. In the world of apps there sometimes seem to be little logic or justice in the way that prices are set and these judgements are made.

People will seemingly pay $0.99 for an app that blows raspberries (a sound that we can all make ourselves for free), but then turn their noses up when presented with a $3 content-rich offering where the physical book equivalent might sell for four times that price.

It’s a fascinating and challenging arena.

So, why should we have to pay more for certain kinds of apps? Well, taking the example of travel apps, creating a good app is no less expensive than creating a good guidebook.

And there is a whole lot more to it than just “chunking” up the book’s content and dumping it into an app.

By far the more interesting aspect of digital travel products, from a publisher’s perspective, is the freedom they offer to really play with formats and do all the things we have never been able to do with books.

Imagine how different digital ideas meetings are to an equivalent gathering discussing books. There are no physical constraints to the conversation. No talk of numbers of pages, or the cost of shipping books around the globe.

Instead, user experiences are discussed; breadcrumb trails are layered across content and exciting interactive elements are chewed over … it’s a whole lot of fun.

But it’s also expensive to do and takes enormous amounts of time and effort to get right … time and effort that people need to be paid for.

Good apps take quality and trusted content and add an element of depth, by surfacing the content and creating an interactive experience, allowing us to experience it in exciting new ways.

There is also the brand element to be considered when looking at price. When individuals weigh up the relative merits of, say, an anonymous Guide to Paris and the Paris: DK Eyewitness iPad app [launched last month], they are perhaps influenced in their choice by brand loyalty and the knowledge that the content is coming from an established team of experienced and trusted writers, editors and designers.

There might also be a brand voice that the user identifies with and wants to experience in this format too. All these things have value, and warrant a price, but that is not to say that publishers and brands have a God-given right to that loyalty.

The digital world is an incredibly transparent and empowering one, and if an unknown voice steps forward with a killer product they are just as likely to succeed with it than a massive brand would.

As I have already hinted, one thing that is hard to do for free is generate unique content that cannot be found elsewhere – there are plenty of cheap-as-chips travel apps out there that do little more than draw on Wikipedia for their guide content and dish it up alongside a photo-feed from flickr.

It’s easy to put together from a developer’s perspective, but not the greatest experience for the punter. As a trusted publisher, one might also go down the root of calling upon the “crowd” for content, but even the aggregation and policing of such a system needs to be paid for.

But that is not to say that all our apps will be paid for, there are also a myriad of reasons why we might choose to produce free apps: to enhance brand awareness, or as a marketing strategy, for example.

We took this approach with the Rough Guides World Lens app. It’s a free travel photography app that really sums up the values of the brand and drives traffic to the website. With over 30,000 downloads in the first few weeks alone, it has been a real success for us.

We have witnessed a real snowball effect with this product as it also has built-in features that enable people to share individual images via either email, Twitter or Facebook.

These kinds of activities work really hard for Rough Guides as a brand and are an essential part of our online activities.

It both promotes digital products and the sales of our physical book products and, of course, with all this extra traffic firing our weblinks around the globe, our online ad partners are happy too.

Free apps also mean more opportunities for third party sponsorship of our products.

It’s a model that is becoming increasingly popular and might either take the form of ad banners served directly to our apps from a third-party ad agency, or a direct relationship with a single ad sponsor. The latter, in particular, can be a really strong lever for both brands involved.

Unsurprisingly, early research shows that people are far more happy to see third party ads in a free app but less so in a paid app.

This kind of free model also creates the opportunity to seed paid-for apps, either by including links back to the App Store or via in-app purchases, where customers buy additional chunks of content to populate their free app.

To date, the real success stories here have been with games and entertainment apps, where developers have been able to make more money giving away an app and then offering additional levels of plugins, than they could if they had charged for the app at the outset.

The bottom line is that this is a very new space for publishers, and we have to experiment to see what works for the kinds of products that we create.

Trying out different pricing models and evaluating results is key to discovering what works. Mixing and matching paid and free apps is part of this process.

The creative industries have changed beyond recognition in the last decade, and creating any kind of print product is no longer the, fairly, exact science that it once was.

NB: This is a guest post by Peter Buckley, digital publisher for Rough Guides and DK Travel.

The first outing in iPad appland will be for DK’s Paris Eyewitness book, building on the brand’s existing tagline of “showing you what others only tell you”.

The app includes cutaways of dozens of Paris’s most famous landmarks, as well as giving users the opportunity to explore close-up details of the city’s architecture.

Other features include specially produced walks through different quarters of the city including photos and details of sites and activities en-route.

But perhaps the most helpful element of the app is that it runs entirely offline and uses the device’s GPS system to identify where the user is on a map.

Unfortunately such joy doesn’t come free. Like its travel guide rival Lonely Planet (although it changed its mind quite quickly), DK has decided to go in hard on the download fee for the app, charging users £10 or $17 each time.

DK plans to launch iPad apps for the London and New York Eyewitness guides by the end of 2010.

The deal with BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the corporation which handles syndication of programmes around the world, will start in December 2010 and give over 100 hundred, IFE-equipped aircraft in the BA fleet access to the BBC’s top shows.

With BBC World News already running on existing IFE systems, passengers will get content from BBC Knowledge (Top Gear, seen above featuring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz), BBC Lifestyle (Masterchef), BBC Entertainment (Luther) and kids’ shows.

BBC watchers might be wondering, however, why BA and the BBC is not missing a golden opportunity to use the corporation’s travel gem Lonely Planet.

The guidebook publisher, which saw 75% of the business acquired by the BBC in 2007, is due to feature more prominently on the BBC.com global website (the version that carries ads) in the coming months.

The idea is to include travel-related material penned by the BBC’s own reporters but also bring in content from LonelyPlanet.com to help populate the channel.

The most likely material will be in the form of destination guides, travel advice and holiday tips, presumably with other interactive functions elsewhere on the Lonely Planet site such as maps.

But it appears such content will not be streamed as part of the BA deal.

A BBC official confirms there are no plans to include Lonely Planet material, video or otherwise, as part of the agreement – meaning passengers in the sweet spot of wanting to learn more about a destination (ie. on the actual journey) will miss out.

LonelyPlanet’s Client solutions team has done work with businesses and organizations before to create travel content and  marketing materials, says spokeswoman Rana Freedman, but the Lee County partnership is unique as it will take in print, online and mobile channels.

Under the agreement, Lonely Planet is on the hook to create a printed guide, a digital version which will be available on Lee County’s website, an iPhone app, eight travel videos narrated by Lonely Planet authors, and a mico-site which Lonely Planet will host.

Here’s the cover of the “specially produced” print guide:

The county also agreed to  advertise on LonelyPlanet.com and in the U.K. version of Lonely Planet Magazine.

One of the goals apparently will be to have plenty of U.K. visitors breaking out their suntan lotion this winter for visits to the Florida Gulf Coast.

The editorial content is slated to be available in December 2010.

“As you know, most visitors & convention bureaus product their own vistor’s guide filled with listings of the various businesses, restaurants and hotels in the area or contract it out to a company to do the same,” Freedman says. “This visitor’s guide will have trusted information and recommendations gathered and written by Lonely Planet, a globally branded publisher.”

Lee Rose, communications manager for the Lee County VCB, notes that beaches in the area were untouched by the BP oil spill, but tourism throughout Florida was impacted nonetheless.

The Lee County VCB received about $500,000 for emergency advertising from Visit Florida, which received about $25 million from BP, Rose says.

However, the marketing partnership with Lonely Planet has nothing to do with those BP-provided monies, he adds.

So, does providing marketing materials to a destination marketing organization provide a conflict with Lonely Planet’s goal of providing an independent, editorial voice?

Says Freedman: “For all these content deals, including Lee County, we have the exact same editorial standards and integrity as our guidebooks. That’s why consumers trust it and why these companies want to work with us. And this is the point of differentiation from them developing their own content — it’s from a trusted third-party source.”

“Lee County isn’t telling us what to put into their visitor guide and our author is researching and writing the booklet just like he would with a Lonely Planet guide,” Freedman adds.

With the upcoming launch of Windows Phone 7, Lonely Planet says its Top Cities 2011 app, developed by Object Consulting, will be available for a free download when the Windows Marketplace launches later in 2010.

So, regarding the chaos reference, travel companies already working on apps for iPhones, iPads, Android devices and Blackberrys, to name a few platforms, now must consider whether the Windows Phone 7 should be on their short list, as well.

Lonely Planet says the Top Cities 2011 app, geared to inspire travel to alluring locales, is an extract from its sixth annual Best in Travel 2011 print edition, which is slated to be published in November 2010.

Lonely Planet cautions that its “2011 top travel lists are shrouded in secrecy until Nov. 1, 2010.”

OK, your secrets are safe here.

—–

Note: Dennis Schaal is affiliated with PhoCusWright as a research analyst.

So, interesting that on Monday this week guidebook giant Lonely Planet uploaded a video to YouTube specifically to promote opportunities within its IT and web development divisions.

This move, of course, chimes with CEO Matthew Goldberg’s drive to push the business into areas outside of its existing and core world of printed guidebooks.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohnrX41nG7Y

Getting less publicity is news that business development manager Alex Cheeseman has left to join hotel site Gekko this week as commercial director.

His departure follows that of Matthew Cashmore, innovation ecosystem manager, quitting a few weeks ago to become digital director for magazine publishing group Hachette.

Cashmore is widely credited with spearheading many of LP’s web and mobile projects over the past 18 months after joining from the BBC in October 2008.

Now you can…

Interesting project from the BBC announced today to show how historical events and places around the world can be reinterpreted by using a Google Map mashup.

Dimensions simply integrates the size of historical events with a user’s own location or any other place around the world, overlaying important places, events and things on a satellite view on a Google Map.

Officials say:

“We’ve built a system that can quickly take scale illustrations of historical events and superimpose them on zoomable, clickable maps. Information designers at the BBC research and produce these illustrations based on a range of library and on-line resources to make them as accurate as possible.”

Simple yet extremely interesting.

The project is broken into different subject areas, including space travel, cities in history, festivals and ancient worlds.

The people behind the project are hoping to refine the system and eventually integrate into the BBC’s science and history sections online. Travel section, too, maybe?

The Lonely Planet Compass Guides cover 25 cities, including Amsterdam, Bangkok, Barcelona, Beijing, Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, Paris, Prague, Rome, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Vancouver, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

They are available for $4.99 each from the Google Android Market.

For each city, the Compass Guides include GPS-enabled maps and location-based information for numerous sites and points of interest across the area. The Android’s compass enables users to figure out where they have wandered to and what the distance is to the next watering hole.

With the exception of the maps, all of the content in the guides can be used offline so roaming fees can be avoided, Lonely Planet says.

Meanwhile, Lonely Planet now offers five Discover e-book titles for the iPad in the Apple iBookstore. The ebooks currently sell for $14.99 [GBP 9.99 and Eur 11.99] each.

The ebooks feature more than 3000 hyperlinks, maps with imbedded points of interest and hundreds of images, Lonely Planet says, adding that users can “navigate easily from expert editorial to specific points of interest, which are then displayed on a map to get you to your destination.”

Of course,  you can also use the ebooks to investigate your preferred destinations with the iPad resting on your stomach from your living room couch before you walk out the door.

Although the UK’s publicly-funded web news service was relaunched this week, BBC Worldwide (the commercial wing of the corporation) is separately looking to revamp the entire BBC.com platform later this summer for users outside of the UK.

BBC.com is supported by advertising and has a wider remit to work with thirds partners or, in this case, utilise some of the corporation’s myriad of commercial operations.

The BBC’s relationship with Lonely Planet (it bought a 75% stake in the company in 2007) is still hugely controversial and plans for the coming months are likely to reinvigorate the debate.

The existing BBC.com carries a widget on the homepage, directing users to Lonely Planet. However, the new incarnation will, for the first time, have a dedicated travel section as one of the main channels on the site.

The idea is to include travel-related material penned by the BBC’s own reporters but also bring in content from LonelyPlanet.com to help populate the channel. A full-time editor was unveiled this week in the shape of ex-New York Times travel and style editor, David Allan.

A BBC Worldwide official says the most likely material will be in the form of destination guides, travel advice and holiday tips, presumably with other interactive functions elsewhere on the Lonely Planet site such as maps.

Other details are still to be confirmed, such as whether LP’s user generated content on the Thorn Tree forums will be fed into the BBC site.

However the corporation says the new travel channel will not have any of the travel search functions that exist on LP for flights, hotels and other travel services.

The company powers the mobile mapping and navigation tools for such manufacturers as Nokia, Blackberry, Ericsson, Motorola, Palm and works in various markets with the likes of Vodafone, O2, France Telecom Group (Orange), Mapquest and Telefonica.

Interesting that little mention elsewhere of quite a significant deal for its and travel guidebook giant Lonely Planet today.

The pair have teamed up to include travel information from Lonely Planet’s existing repertoire of content to stream into Telmap’s mobile search, mapping and navigation products for handsets and operators.

Launching initially for users in South Africa (timed poorly from a global perspective to coincide after the FIFA World Cup), Telmap’s deal with Lonely Planet will be rolled out to owners in additional global markets in the coming months.

The product news concerns the new Platinum Planet service, an web-based system which works by providing information and materials to independent booksellers as well as offering customer support and “best practice” for retailers.

But Lonely Planet appears to have upset a number of travellers with its playing down of one of the biggest political disturbances in years in Bangkok, the main transport hub and backpacker re-fuelling stop in Asia.

There was no mention or any offer of advice via its popular Twitter profile during the past 24 hours for those in or planning to travel to Bangkok, despite the rapid escalation of violence between government soldiers and protesters.

But what enraged many is the lack of coverage on the main Lonely Planet website.

Critics were astounded that the top story on one of the world’s leading travel websites had decided to focus on a story about a US basketball player. this was later pushed down by an article about the Lonely Planet awards.

The second story, Is It Safe to Travel to Thailand, only sent users to a comment thread on the site’s popular Thorn Tree forum. An extra link pointed to a news story on the BBC from the previous day.

The decision is understood to have infuriated a number of Lonely Planet authors.

Lonely Planet officials have responded in the comments section below…