Photo-rich, experience-oriented travel guides have proliferated in recent seasons. Publishers continue to update the traditional paperbacks that travelers dog-ear and tote along in their daypacks, but they’re also expanding their coffee-table offerings, meant to help vacation-minded planners and aspiring globe-trotters imagine where they’ll go next. PW spoke with editors at major guidebook imprints about their newest conceptual itineraries.
Toast of the nation
Many contemporary tourists want to travel “for a particular reason, not necessarily to a particular destination,” says Fodor’s editorial director Doug Stallings. The popularity of Fodor’s guide to Napa and Sonoma, he says, suggested that readers may be interested in other parts of the U.S. “that are particularly strong in the wine, distilling, or even the beer tradition.”
Cue American Spirits (Nov.), which introduces basics of wine-making, beer-brewing, and spirit-distilling. The guide divides the country into 12 regions, familiarizing readers with the microbrews of the Pacific Northwest, the whiskeys and bourbons of Greater Appalachia, and the vineyards of Colorado’s wine country.
At DK, the October release Road Trips in the USA pays homage to the American tradition of filling up the tank (or, these days, charging the battery) and hitting the road. Itineraries cover all 50 states and have varied emphases. Some highlight historical significance, such as the Civil Rights Trail, a 570-mile drive from Georgia to Tennessee; others, including the 55-mile Haˉna Highway on Maui, offer scenic views and postcard-worthy opportunities to, for instance, sojourn with sea turtles and snack at coconut stands. Georgina Dee, publishing director at DK, says that books like Road Trips in the USA, which tend to be larger in format and more sweeping in content than traditional guides, outline ideas for a traveler to revisit over time.
To this end, DK’s inspirational titles “include a mixture of epic or aspirational journeys and more attainable trips,” Dee says. Take The Travel Bucket List (Oct.), which suggests joining an expedition to the North Pole, an undertaking that requires significant logistical planning and expenditure. It also recommends that readers savor a glass of mezcal in Oaxaca, Mexico, an experience that’s comparatively simpler to achieve.
Postcards from the edge
Inverting the idea of the bucket list, National Geographic’s Go to Hell (Aug.) proposes that curious travelers can make a pit stop in the afterlife and then go home again. Science writer Erika Engelhaupt (Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science), organizes the international locales into three categories—“Portals to the Underworld,” “Hells on Earth,” and “Otherworldly Destinations”—and explains “the historical and scientific phenomena” behind their infernal reputations, says Allyson Johnson, executive editor at National Geographic Books. Italy’s volcanic Phlegraean Fields, to take one example, likely inspired Dante’s Inferno; elsewhere, the eerily red water of Antarctica’s Blood Falls gets its color from iron-rich rivers beneath the ice.
The book is geared toward “the dark tourism trend—people going to haunted houses and on ghost tours,” Johnson says. “We’re trying to meet people’s needs. How can we inspire them to add places to their lists of potential destinations, or how can our books let them ‘travel’ from the comfort of their own homes?”
Two other forthcoming travel titles from NatGeo—100 Hotels of a Lifetime by Annie Fitzsimmons and 100 Nights of a Lifetime by Stephanie Vermillion, both out in December—were pitched by their respective authors. “A lot of people love traveling for the sake of the hotel—hotels are destinations in themselves,” Johnson says of Fitzsimmons’s book. And 100 Nights of a Lifetime is fortuitously slotted to come out in a time of “cosmic wonders,” she says. “This year there have been more auroras than in about a decade. And the book has more than star-gazing—there are suggestions for trips to bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico, or a visit to the Great Wall of China at night.”
Restorative postures
Rough Guides began its most recent line of inspirational guides in 2019, with Make the Most of Your Time on Earth. Sarah Clark, head of publishing at Rough Guides, says inspirational titles offer a chance to explore travel options in greater depth, particularly sustainable and environmentally conscious journeys. The Rough Guide to Slow Travel in Europe, due out in October, plots expeditions of varying lengths, some unfolding across several countries: a train trek through Scandinavia expands from six hours to three weeks through many off-train detours that encourage travelers to embrace the Nordic concept of friluftsliv (“outdoor living”).
“Inspirational guides are our showcases,” Clark says. “They’re a fantastic opportunity to explore with the kind of detail we wouldn’t be able to do in a standard travel guide.” The recently released Rough Guide to Rewilding in Britain also centers the environment, defining rewilding as “a return to natural processes: avoiding the use of fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals and allowing nature to use its own methods.” The 15 rewilding sites covered in the book represent a range of locations and terrains that have benefitted from restoration: Cumbria’s Haweswater region, for instance, is described as a mix of “mossy woodlands, moorlands, heath and bog, and rushing streams set within a dramatic mountain landscape” that can be accessed year-round (albeit with no visitor facilities). Wilder Doddington, an erstwhile farm, is now a nature area and a destination that annually hosts thousands of visitors and events.
Lonely Planet’s forthcoming The Joy of Quiet Places (Sept.) also acknowledges the benefits of returning to nature, pointing readers toward peaceful sites like Namibia’s Skeleton Coast National Park, an enormous stretch of sand and seacoast, or the city of Konya in Turkey, a site of Sufi mysticism and final home of the poet Rumi, for “unplugging and de-stressing,” says Piers Pickard, managing director of publishing at Lonely Planet. “The book has a connection to ideas of wellness, the need to get away from the chaos of everyday life,” he adds.
Pickard sums up travelers’ desire to let their interests and passions lead the way. “Travel has become much less about seeing things than it was 10 or 20 years ago,” he says. “It’s much more about experiencing things and cultural curiosity.”
Vera Kean is a writer living in New York City.
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