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Book sales for the travel genre have been hit hard by the financial crisis, with Nielsen BookScan figures revealing an 8.7% drop by value on last year’s total.
In general, the book market has seen a year-on-year decline of 1.5%. As well as dealing with difficulties on the high street, travel publishing has been influenced by the knock-on effects of the collapse of several budget airlines and rising aviation fuel costs. Additionally, road atlases and street maps were particularly badly hit by the popularity of satnav and the overall downward trend is expected to continue this year. Tom Hall, travel editor of Lonely Planet, said: "People aren’t terribly optimistic. You’ve got to accept that there will be some decline."
Andrew Steed, general retail manager at Stanfords bookshop, London, said the situation was "pretty grim" and that he had "noticed a big drop in sales" in December. He believed this was due to the general public neither travelling nor shopping.
Although the total genre is down 8.7% in revenue terms, travel and holiday guides themselves are down only 4.8% in volume. The genres worst hit in 2008 were road atlases and street plans, which suffered year-on-year losses of 12.6% and 19.6% by value.
Retailers said that the advancement of modern technology, including satellite navigation systems and internet route-finders, meant that steet atlases were losing their popularity. Additionally, the "where to stay, eat and drink" sub-genre is down 20.9% in terms of value and the rise in popularity of internet websites that provide this type of information was partially blamed for this.
However, publishers plan to try to benefit from the more buoyant areas of the travel market—such as those European holiday destinations that have not adopted the euro. Donald Greig, m.d. of Bradt believed that poor exchange rates were affecting where people holiday. He said: "It makes sense, travellers are savvy."
Ian MacDonald, sales and marketing director of Geocentre, said: "The two countries which have shown enormous growth are Turkey and Egypt. I definitely think that this is people saying that they don’t want to holiday inside the Eurozone."