The Bookseller.com

9th January 2009

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Unhappy travellers launch online guides

22.04.08 Victoria Arnstein

A group of travellers frustrated with "outdated and inaccurate" information in traditional guidebooks have launched their own downloadable and print-on-demand guides.

Just Go Guides (www.justgoguides.com) enables users to create a personal guide including only the information that they think will be useful for their trip. This can then be downloaded free onto a laptop, mobile phone or iPod, with the user paying only the internet connection fee, or they can pay £15 to have a book printed.

Peter Huyse, owner, said that the guides currently cover 14 countries in Central and South America but that this is being gradually increased. One of the major advantages, he said, was that the guides were constantly updated by a team of country editors and writers, while venues such as hotels and restaurants moved up and down a recommended list according to how they were rated by travellers who submitted their feedback via SMS.

Huyse said he expected traditional guidebook brands to follow suit but that the move to digital wasn’t happening quickly enough. "Lonely Planet is selling chapters in a PDF format which is great, but it is still the same content, it is not updated so often. I think [the move to digital is]
happening slowly and we just wanted it to be a bit faster."

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