After the post-9/11 slump came a period of cautious optimism among travel publishers, and now it seems that 2003 can be declared the year of the comeback. Bill Newlin, publisher of Avalon Travel (encompassing the Rick Steves, Moon Handbooks and Foghorn Outdoors series), says, "Our optimism is not cautious at all. In fact, we're feeling a little giddy. The third and fourth quarters of 2003 went better and better. Whether the first six months of 2004 will be as strong as the first six months of 2001, time will tell, but we're very, very close to it."
"We've had nothing but positive news since October 2003," agrees Michael Spring, publisher of Wiley's Frommer's imprint. "People are back in the saddle, and you have to attribute it to a pent-up desire for travel and a need to get away in a pressure cooker of a world, and maybe to a sense that 9/11 is further away than it was six months ago."
Lonely Planet, which now has more than 600 travel books on its list, also reported its best results ever in the U.S. for the last two quarters of 2003. And Tom Mercer, project editor for St. Martin's Let's Go guides, says simply, "Travel has rebounded."
The market may have recovered, but it has also changed. David Naggar, president of audio, diversified, travel and information at Fodor's, says, "The market's constructed differently now. I don't think that's a bad thing or a good thing. It just is. There seems to be a lot of hand-wringing among publishers, but it's my feeling that it's your job as a publisher to see those trends, get out in front of them and publish to them."
There's a sense, too, that the recent slump, while not desirable, left the industry more competitive and streamlined. "Tough times force businesses to make tough decisions, which means that clouds often do have silver linings—if you survive the storm," says James O'Reilly, president and publisher of Travelers' Tales.
Avalon's Newlin says, "The whole process certainly compelled us to focus on things that were working the best. Now we're lean, we're mean and we feel very positive about where things are."
Harlan Smith, book buyer for Chicago's Savvy Traveller bookstore, comments, "After 9/11 and the bad economy in 2002, some publishers really re-examined their lists. As a result, there have been fewer new series."
New Faces
Still, publishers are loading some new series onto the luggage carousel. In June, Rough Guides will launch Directions, with six guides to cities including London and Venice. These will be picture-heavy, and each title will have a first printing of about 35,000 copies. Marketing manager Megan Kennedy observes, "We wouldn't put ourselves behind a new series if we didn't think things were improving."
This summer, Fodor's will launch the See It series of books, covering both cities and countries and featuring color photography. Destinations on the first slate include Australia, Canada, Barcelona and Rome. Frommer's plans to launch its first (as yet unnamed) color series in early 2005.
At Let's Go, the books formerly known as Map Guides are being relaunched as Let's Go Pocket City guides, but it's more than mere rebranding at work. "We've added easy-to-use gray tabs that direct you to the right section, and we've rejiggered the indexes," reports Mercer. The guides will be available in March for five foreign cities, including Berlin and Amsterdam, and five domestic cities, including Boston and Washington, D.C.
The Moon Metro series, launched in spring 2002, will reach 20 titles this year. "We came from one to 20 in fairly short order," says Avalon's Newlin. The Metro series targets an audience that Newlin describes as "younger, hipper and willing to take a last-minute fare and hop off to a city at the drop of a hat. The listings are extremely current, and by current I don't mean the phone numbers are updated—I mean newer restaurants that have a buzz to them."
That hip, young audience is also the target of Norton's new Art/Shop/Eat series, due in April with books on five European cities and New York. Says assistant editor Morgen Van Vorst, "They're aimed at the 25 and up age group and meant for people who have two to five days in the city."
Back to the Future
Americans are going abroad again: the U.S. Department of State issued 7,300,667 passports to Americans in fiscal year 2003, an all-time record. But file this news under everything old is new again: Americans are also returning to the same European destinations they visited before 9/11.
"It's like the guy in Monty Python who says, 'I'm not dead yet,' " remarks Fodor's Naggar. "Italy and Spain are doing particularly well. People are nervous about Europe to some degree, but those two countries are safe and chock-full of things to see and do."
"International travel is coming back faster than domestic, but that's because international fell so much further," says Frommer's Spring. "Italy is back as our number two destination after Hawaii."
Sunny, relatively inexpensive Greece has long been a solid destination for American travelers, but with the summer Olympics taking place in Athens this year, publishers are issuing both new and revised books on the country and its capital city.
Interlink will publish A Traveller's History of Athens by Richard Stoneman (Mar.) and Athens: A Cultural and Literary History by Michael Llewellyn Smith (May). In February, Time Out/Penguin will publish Time Out Athens, which includes descriptions of the Olympic stadiums and a schedule of events. In a more cerebral vein, in June, North Point Press will publish George Sarrinikolaou's Facing Athens: Encounters with the Modern City, a meditation on the ancient city's adjustment to the 21st century.
Due in March from Lonely Planet are updated editions of Best of Athens by Victoria Kyriakopoulos, Greece by Carolyn Bain et al. and Greek Islands by Carolyn Bain et al. In April, Fodor's will publish Barrie Kerper's Athens: The Collected Traveler. Coming in May is The Rough Guide City Map: Athens, followed by the 10th edition of The Rough Guide to Greece (June) and the fifth edition of The Rough Guide to the Greek Islands (July). In addition, Athens will be one of the destinations covered in the publisher's new Directions series.
South and Central America are also drawing new interest from U.S. citizens. "Places like Rio and Buenos Aires are becoming more popular," says Kennedy at Rough Guides. The first edition of the Rough Guide to South America, due next month, covers 13 countries in 1,100 pages. The Rough Guide to the Baltic States (Mar.) is also new and, according to Kennedy, is a concrete response to consumer demand. "People were asking, 'Why don't you have a book on Estonia?' " she marvels.
According to Elizabeth Newhouse, director of travel publishing at National Geographic, "Italy used to be our biggest seller, but now we do much more with Costa Rica, Hawaii and Arizona." Costa Rica continues to sell across the board, and Lonely Planet president Todd Sotkiewicz says, "Panama today is what Costa Rica was 10 years ago. In general, travel to Latin America is up 5.1%."
St. Martin's Mercer says, "Tropical and sub-tropical destinations are selling really well." Let's Go is offering new titles on Brazil and Puerto Rico. With official publication months of January 2004, they were in stores at the end of 2003 and performed strongly out of the gate.
Trouble Spots
While travel to South and Central America is booming, Asia was a bust in early 2003. When the deadly SARS virus erupted in China and Hong Kong early last year, tourism to Asia slumped instantly—as did sales of guidebooks. "SARS virtually wiped out travel to East Asia during early 2003," says Magnus Bartlett, publisher at Asian specialist Odyssey Books & Guides.
But the SARS effect seems to have been as short-lived as it was unexpected. National Geographic's Newhouse says, "Our China guide has done phenomenally well. SARS derailed it, but it's come back very strong."
Sometimes sales patterns are easy to analyze—SARS hits, guides to China stop selling. Other trends, however, are puzzling, to say the least. Several publishers report strong sales of guides to both Iraq and Afghanistan in the past year. Norton's Van Vorst says, "We have strange things selling out, like Blue Guides to Albania and Kosovo."
Globe Pequot's Bradt Travel Guides, which have always been aimed at mature, adventurous travelers looking to give something back, celebrate their 30th anniversary in 2004. Recent releases include guides to Kabul and North Korea.
Most publishers venture that purchasers are not actually visiting those places, but instead use the guides as educational tools. "A lot of people are just interested in the culture," says Shana Capozza, director of marketing at Globe Pequot. "Also, we've found that travelers who go to more dangerous spots are not as put off by world events as others might be."
Elaine Petrocelli, co-owner of Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif., conjectures, "The true travelers are saying, 'Where are we safe? We might as well get on the road.' "
What Did You Say?
Hand-in-hand with sales of guides to foreign countries—with a few exceptions like Canada, England and Australia—stand sales of phrasebooks and bilingual dictionaries.
Langenscheidt's Berlitz arm, the brand name in language aids, is offering several new lines, all compact and geared to travelers. For the first time in 2004, Berlitz will publish its Picture Dictionaries in trade paperback format; each contains more than 1,000 illustrated words. Also new are the Berlitz Mini Guides—accordion-folded, credit-card sized guides that open to reveal useful phrases. The Mini Guides are available in three specialties: Eating and Drinking in..., Shopping in... and Surviving in..., each initially in French, German, Italian and Spanish. From Berlitz, too, is the uncensored Hide This Book series, replete with native expressions and slang.
The books in Tuttle's Making Out in… series offer such useful phrases as "You're crazy!" and "Come on, drink a little bit more." The series launched in 1989 with Japanese, and Tuttle continues to build the line slowly, this year adding Filipino and Arabic. Tuttle is also adding Arabic to other language lines in April with the Essential Arabic Phrase Book and the Pocket Arabic Dictionary. "We had done a Koran book, and sales of that spiked very dramatically over the last couple of years," says Tuttle editorial director Ed Walters. "Then we began to see interest at the consumer and retail level."
The HarperCollins Language Survival Guide series, which launched last spring, is expanding as well with the addition of Greece, Portugal and Germany. While perhaps not as edgy as Tuttle's Making Out… series, the books have a humorous cover look and an informal feel. Says HarperResource editorial director Megan Newman, "The phrases seem like something you might actually say." Newman is looking to add a few Asian destinations as well, "places where people are totally at sea."
Flag-waving, Gas-guzzling
One of the most frequently mentioned aftereffects of the tumult of the last few years is the increase in domestic travel and the decrease in overseas trips. Initially, this seemed to spell trouble for travel publishers since, as Frommer's Spring puts it, "People don't always perceive a need for a guidebook when traveling domestically."
But instead the attitude towards domestic travel seems to have changed. Sally Scanlon, associate publisher at The Intrepid Traveller, says, "It used to be that for domestic trips, people would hop in the car, head for a place and pick up literature from the local tourist office when they got there. Now they are more likely to research the trip thoroughly ahead of time." One example of an effort to satisfy an automobile-driven niche is the publisher's Florida Spring Training: Your Guide to Touring the Grapefruit League (Jan.) by Alan Byrd. In the face of longer security processes at airports, Americans continue to travel frequently by car. Dave Hunter, author and publisher of Along Interstate-75, now in its 12th edition, reports a 30% increase in pre-publication orders this fall.
"The trend towards getting in a car and exploring the U.S. has grown since 9/11 and shows no sign of slowing down," says Frommer's Spring. In 2002, Frommer's published the first edition of Frommer's Guide to the Best RV and Tent Campgrounds in the U.S.A., which has built sales momentum that seems not to have been affected by the arrival of cold weather. Even in December, more than 200 copies sold per week.
Likewise, Newhouse reports of National Geographic's Guide to the National Parks of the United States, "It used to sell tremendously in spring and summer and then die off, but this year it has done the same every single week."
Read All About It
One category's slump is another category's opportunity, as became clear over the last few years as frustrated travelers turned to armchair travel writing to sate their wanderlust. As part of the recovery in travel, however, virtual travel declined in 2003.
Barbara Meade, co-owner of Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., notes, "People are buying the actual guidebooks instead of the travel literature." She adds, however, that armchair travel is a category generally buoyed largely by one or two big titles, and this year's offerings simply haven't sold in the numbers of past books. She says, "There was a new Bill Bryson this year [A Short History of Nearly Everything, Broadway], but it was hard to get. And we did very well with Caroline Alexander's The Bounty [Viking], but not nearly as well as we did with The Endurance [Knopf, 1998] in years past."
At Book Passage, however, Petrocelli sold more than 300 copies of The Kindness of Strangers (Lonely Planet, Oct. 2003), 75 of those in the week before Christmas alone. "Quality armchair travel is so strong, but it has to be quality," she says. "Often stuff gets published that just isn't up there."
Publishers large and small will try to hit the mark in 2004. Random House has a list of titles in this category that includes Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece by Robert D. Kaplan (Feb.), while Simon & Schuster offers Walking to Vermont: The Further Adventures of a Foreign Correspondent (March) by Christopher S. Wren. In May, VanderWyk & Burnham will publish the quirky A Year of Sundays: Taking the Plunge (and Our Cat) to Explore Europe, in which Edward D. Webster recounts the sabbatical year he and his blind wife and their 16-year-old cat spent traveling around Europe.
Internet Shminternet
Five or so years ago, during the Internet boom, guidebook publishers looked to the future with apprehension. Would the availability of free information eat into sales of guidebooks? With an estimated 80% of Americans reporting that they have Internet access, the answer is in—a resounding no.
"People today are going on the Internet first to choose where they're going, but then they go to a bookstore," says Fodor's Naggar. "The Internet and guides have turned out to be more complementary than we ever imagined." Avalon's Newlin agrees: "Ultimately the Internet has been positive for travel books; it has promoted travel literacy in general and people are getting grooved on using some of this information."
For its part, Lonely Planet maintains a highly trafficked on-line bulletin board. "We have up to 150 writers on the road at any point in time, but people writing on the bulletin board supplement those sources," says Sotkiewicz.
In mid-January, Let's Go will launch a Web site (www.beyondtourism.com) based on the "Beyond Tourism" sections of its books that address opportunities for alternatives such as working or serving as a volunteer abroad. The site will include 1,000 to 1,500 listings culled from the guidebooks. Mercer expects it to encourage sales by advertising one of the series' unique features. "The only place the Internet can hurt you is with people who are only traveling for a weekend and might choose not to buy a guidebook," he says.
Globe Pequot's Capozza agrees that "the series that were affected by Internet competitions were mostly those that focused on inns, where you might just want one and can find it pretty easily on the Internet." Globe Pequot relaunched its Web site (www.globepequot.com) in 2003, transforming it from a b2b tool to a searchable index.
The National Geographic site (www.nationalgeographic.com) sells travel books, but is unlikely to replace them, says Newhouse. "Even though people spend a lot of time on the Internet, there's a real need for the filter and discriminating voice you find in a book."
Sales patterns have changed, however, due to the Internet and other influences. "People are planning trips much later now," says Frommer's Spring. "They're waiting to find out about bargains." National Geographic's Newhouse concurs that "people aren't making travel plans very far in advance. They're waiting to see what happens."
Distribution has changed, too. Says Avalon's Newlin, "We're now selling through big-box retailers like Costco and BJ's and Sam's who are doing more regional distribution."
"Right at this moment, our retail partners are willing to give more space and dedicate more promotions to travel. Clearly, there's a lift," says Langenscheidt Publishing Group (which encompasses Berlitz, Insight Guides and Hammond atlases) president Stuart Dolgins. "I was with a major chain this week, and they are increasing space because they see encouraging signs. But I also would add that we're very fragile. If one horrendous thing happens, we'll have a problem."
Where To?
So, travel publishing has survived terrorism, a depressed economy and Internet competition. What will publishers face next?
"The biggest challenge for publishers of travel literature is not so much the economic climate or the fear of terrorism or disease, but a decline in reading," asserts O'Reilly of Travelers' Tales. "Convincing travelers that they will have a better trip and be enriched by reading before they go or after they return—well, there's a guy who's been doing that kind of work for years, and his name is Sisyphus."
Yet the Travel Industry Association of America sees the popularity of guidebooks growing, and reports that in 2003 for the first time books were more popular than newspaper travel sections as sources of information for travelers.
Frommer's Spring cautions, "It's my sense that guidebooks run the risk of becoming interchangeable. It's not enough to tell travelers to go to the Louvre. You have to tell them there's a coat check room in the basement where there's no line that can save them 20 minutes." In other words, no matter what lies ahead, high-quality guidance will remain golden. As Spring puts it, "All we have is the credibility of our information."
