With apologies to Heraclitus, no person ever visits the same destination twice. Travel publishers are taking this sentiment to heart, revamping existing guides and offering new perspectives on favorite locales.
At Lonely Planet, managing director of publishing Piers Pickard says, “We’re updating our Pocket Guides to make them more inspirational. Pocket London, for example, will include more photography, as well as sections to help people navigate by experience rather than place.”
The series, designed for trips of one to seven days, is also venturing to two new destinations: Pocket Azores and Pocket Cabo Verde are due out in October. “The Azores are perfectly placed for travel, in the Atlantic between Europe and the U.S.,” Pickard says of the Portuguese territory, adding that the island chain was “a popular destination during the pandemic, along with everywhere else in Portugal, because the country stayed very open.” Both the Azores and Cabo Verde, an island nation near West Africa, “are relatively small, so we thought Pocket was the appropriate format.”
Avalon Travel’s Moon imprint has historically been strongest in Asia and the Americas, but, says Avalon publisher Jaimee Callaway, “We’ve had our eye on Europe for a while.” Moon’s expansion to the continent, which began in 2019, continues with Moon Seville, Granada & Andalusia: With Cordoba, Malaga & Tangier (Nov.) and Provence and the French Riviera (Jan. 2025). Overtourism was a problem even before 2020, Callaway says, so “there was a need for titles that highlight travel outside of the core city centers.”
Travel impresario Rick Steves, whose eponymous imprint falls under the Avalon umbrella, made his name leading visitors from the U.S. to Europe, but his geographical résumé is more expansive. In 1978, he traveled overland from Eastern Europe to Nepal, an experience he documented in the journals that form the heart of his forthcoming On the Hippie Trail (Feb. 2025). When Steves made that trip, Callaway says, “a generation of backpackers realized that there wasn’t information available for the kind of travel they wanted to do. So they made guides themselves.”
Double takes
New offerings at Fodor’s include November’s InFocus Lisbon, which editorial director Doug Stallings says is “an expanded version of the Lisbon content from our larger Portugal guide,” and a recently released, full-length guide to Mexico City. “We did a book called Inside Mexico City in 2020, geared toward people renting Airbnbs and staying for a longer time,” Stallings says. “But it’s such a big, sprawling city that it’s hard to do in a digested format, so we decided to publish a full-fledged treatment.”
At Hardie Grant, a new angle is revitalizing the publisher’s approach to a classic. “Japan is an evergreen destination for international tourists: 629,000 U.S. visitors arrived there between October 2023 and March 2024,” says Hardie Grant commissioning editor Amanda Louey. “And with the current interest in sustainable travel, travelers are turning to trains.” Japan’s convenient rail passes make train travel especially appealing for visitors, she says; Train Japan (Dec.) by Steve Wide and Michelle Mackintosh offers “both geographic and thematic itineraries.”
In January, Rough Guides is releasing Pocket Rough Guide Geneva, marking the first time the publisher has devoted an entire book to the Swiss city. “We do have a guide to Switzerland,” says Sarah Clark, head of publishing at Rough Guides. “But although Geneva is a major financial center, I haven’t seen a Geneva guide before. It could have an interesting reach, because Geneva gets tourists and also people coming for work, or flying in because they’re going somewhere else nearby, like the French Alps.”
Also on deck: The Rough Guide to Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan (Nov.), the publisher’s first venture into the Caucasus region. “We have an extensive European list,” Clark says, “and we felt the area, which is both interesting and not a mainstream travel destination, was under-covered by us and by other publishers.”
Whether heading to new regions or rethinking old approaches, Clark says, travel publishers have the same goal they’ve always had: “We’re creating showcases for our authors’ and editors’ knowledge and love of travel.”
