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Travel publishers missing out on £19m

14.02.08 Victoria Arnstein

Travel publishers and booksellers gave away just under £19m of their profits last year through discounting, according to the second annual Travel Publishing Yearbook.

The report, based on Nielsen BookScan data and written by travel publishing consultant and former AA Publishing m.d. Stephen Mesquita, found that both the core travel category—travel guides and maps—and non-core travel, which includes travel writing, local history and phrase books, recorded sales increases in 2007, reversing the 2006 trend. Overall, travel was up 5.95% in 2007, compared to a 2.93% fall in 2006.

However, Mesquita said profits could be higher if publishers came up with new marketing ideas. "Retailers and publishers generously gave their public £19m of their profits in 2007 in discounts," he said. "I would question whether that is necessary to get people to buy travel guides or if it is simply a lazy form of marketing."

The report found that sales of regional guides increased 3% on 2006, city guides increased by 1% but country guides were down by 5%. Walking guides and maps had a good year, with sales up by 31% and 12% respectively.

The success of new brands such as Wallpaper*, Cool Camping and Mr & Mrs Smith caused Mesquita to question whether older brands were "making their content interesting for the consumer".

"The last really innovative thing in travel publishing was the launch of the DK Eyewitness travel guides in the early 1990s. They are still reaping the benefits of that innovation 15 years later. I'm not saying that nothing has happened since then, but sometimes travel publishers are so obsessed with the information that they forget how to present it," Mesquita said.

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