A fortune waiting to be made: App Store travel guides

Published on 5^th April 2009 in Tech, Travel, tagged App Store, iPhone, iPod Touch, iTunes, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides.

When you go on holiday, there’s nothing better than having a good travel guide book. The best ones like Lonely Planet and Rough Guides provide accurate and in-depth information about the places you’re at or going to, with maps, pictures and so on. This is especially useful when you don’t have access to the Internet and are cut off from the wealth of information it can provide you with.

However, when you travel, weight and space in your luggage are at a premium, and guide books take up a comparatively large amount of these. This summer I’ll be travelling to the USA, Canada, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina. If I took guide books for each country with me, they would probably take up about a quarter of my bag! Because of this simple physical limitation, I’m going to buy fewer travel guides and the publishers who make them will lose sales.

Yet there is a way which both the publishers and consumers could win: the App Store. The idea of electronic books has been round for a very long time, but the iPhone and iPod Touch offer a number of unique features which make them an even better proposition. First of all, being able to have a proper menu system instead of a standard reading interface lends itself well to non-linear content like reference books. You could also utilise the search facility and in the case of the iPhone, GPS and calling.

Imagine that you’re walking around an ancient battlefield; the travel guide could bring up a map of how it used to be and superimpose your location on top of it. It would provide a far better context than a simple paper map. You could also foresee using the same functionality in a busy city where you only need information about the places near to you. Even if GPS was used as a shortcut to articles relating to nearby places, it would still add huge value to the concept of a travel guide.

To me, travel guides present an ideal opportunity to make App Store applications. Once you’ve designed one guide, you can use the same interface for every other book you have. With a simple way of adding new content, it could practically be a license to print money.

The main barrier that I can imagine is that a 700 page book with maps and pictures translates to a fairly hefty file size. There’s also the issue of licensing and geocoding so much content. However, if these can be overcome, then I think that the travel guide companies will be on to a real winner.