The End of Travel Guidebooks

The modern guidebook, epitomised perhaps by Lonely Planet, invented modern travel. No longer beholden to tour companies and their empty-headed schedules, people began to travel independently, and felt safe doing so. All the knowledge they might need was, after all, contained between the glossy covers of a recently updated book.

In the pages of my large, much thumbed India guide, I've established the fastest way to travel from Gorakphur to Dehradun and discovered the cheapest, and quite possibly dirtiest, place to eat in Delhi's Pahar Ganj. I've found a trekking company in the hills near Madikeri and a village homestay in Khuri. But guidebooks are more than just train schedules and a listing of sites. They're tactile, weighty and, as a result, somehow reassuring. I used the same guide as a pillow, a makeshift tripod and, once, to squash a brazen cockroach.

Today, the guidance available in a book, like all information, is being digitised, and moved quickly onto the pages of the internet or the applications of always-plugged-in iPhones. As it does, it often becomes free and more nuanced.

In China, like many countries, the Lonely Planet reigns supreme. Backpackers from everywhere follow its advice, and inevitably stay in the same hotels and hostels, visit the same sites and eat at the same restaurants. Publishers claim that their guides are definitive, and this allows us to feel that our experience of a place has been, in some ways, complete. People who have done most of what the Lonely Planet advises will often say - to my horror - that they have 'done' a place.

But Lonely Planet and its ilk might be near the end of their offline reign. Travel guides of quality have started to appear online. As these guides proliferate, travellers, with more access to information, are given a wider range of choices. No guide lists exactly the same places, in exactly the same way, and this might, I hope, mean that the end of 'doing' a place is nigh. Online guides often cater to niche audiences, or focus on specific regions, and this might lead to the creation of new, much smaller constellations, in the same way that guidebooks created backpackers.

I have, over the past two months, written two guides to travel in China: a brief guide to Shanghai, linked to the listings of City Weekend, a portal for the city's English speaking expats, and a Suzhou travel guide. I've discovered, in the process, how much work, and expense, goes into the writing of a travel guide. You must first get yourself to a destination. You then follow the advice of other travel guides, because it would be extremely laborious to start from scratch, and finally, once you have some sense of the place, you must try to discover new places, so that you can surpass what has already been written. This is, of course, how information grows. As it does, the notion of 'doing' a place, of seeing everything worth seeing, will slowly shatter.

We will, I expect, start to travel differently. Leaving the beaten track will become easier and, at the same time, more difficult. Perhaps people will less often travel to see well-documented sites and become more interested in travelling to meet people, to enjoy an experience that cannot be reproduced.


Iain_Manley

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