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To be blunt, 2018 was not a vintage year for travel books. At 5.9 million units sold for £55.3m through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, the Atlases, Maps & Travel category posted its lowest-ever volume and value since full-market records began in 2001. Every sub- category fell in both volume and value terms against 2017, with the exception of Cycling Maps & Guides, which inched 0.71% in value—albeit after a 15% drop the year before.
Overall, the category declined 5% in volume and 5.5% in value year on year—a relatively harsh decline, particularly in value, compared to the water-treading the category has achieved since around 2013.
As the 2008 credit crunch hit, the market’s value dropped from £103.4m in 2007, declining by 8%–10% year on year for the next five years. Since 2014, however, Travel has had a mini-recovery of sorts in value terms, even posting—clutch your pearls—growth in 2015 and 2016, by 0.32% and 1.47% respectively. But the past two years—the pound’s faltering against the Euro, general Brexit malaise, but most of all, so much travel content being available for free on the internet—have bitten, with value at just over half the category’s 2004 peak of £105m.
There were TCM slides for travel publishing’s top dogs—Lonely Planet’s sales dropped 2.5% to £11.9m in 2018 and DK was down 4.8% to £6.9m. But the two actually grew market share: Lonely Planet to 21.5% (from 20.8% ) and DK to 12.7% (from 12.3%). Lonely Planet and DK combined to claim a massive 52.8% share of the £33.6m earned by the sector’s biggest sub-category, Travel & Holiday Guides: General. Ordnance Survey’s share dropped to 10.6% in the overall Travel category (on sales of £5.9m), but it accounted for a whopping 51.7% of General Folded Maps & Walking Guides’ sales.
The big winner in share growth is APA Publications, owing to its aquistion in late 2017 of Rough Guides from DK. The combined group, which includes Rough Guides, Insight Guides and Berlitz, shifted £5.1m in 2018, or 9.2% of the Travel category.
This, we should underscore, is BookScan data only. We cannot measure the boost that publishers have from their own digital products or export sales, which the relatively low pound has actually helped since the Brexit vote. And as we see in our Travel Market Focus many publishers are bucking the downward print trend, including walking and trekking specialist Cicerone Press, while companies such as DK are doubling down and reaffirming their confidence in physical books.
How much of Travel’s recent slump can we blame on Brexit? Perhaps we won’t see the true Brexit effect on travel guides until the UK departs the European Union on 29th March. It has to be said that 2016, the year Britain voted Leave and consequently saw the pound drop to its lowest levels in 30 years, was an unusually healthy one for Travel, with sub-categories Travel & Holiday Guides, Phrasebooks and even General Folded Maps & Walking Guides posting growth.
Home comforts
But maybe Brits are eschewing European holidays in favour of staycations and, to a lesser extent, further-flung locations where the locals don’t (necessarily) shudder and ask about the B-word as soon as they hear your accent. In 2007—the market’s last year of volume growth—the second bestselling title in the Travel sector was 501 Must-Visit Destinations, trailing only the 100,000-copy bestselling Collins 2008 Road Atlas Britain. (How times have changed.) In contrast, 2018 returned a top five of travel guides for UK-located attractions, with The Imperial War Museum London scoring its fifth-consecutive year in the overall number one slot.
Four out of the top five Travel titles are military-based—two editions of Churchill War Rooms and Imperial War Museum Duxford join The Imperial War Museum London at the top—which gives an interesting insight into how the UK book-buying public is feeling as we carry out sensitive negotiations with Europe. Lonely Planet Pocket Rome was the only European city to fly the blue EU flag in the top 10, with Lonely Planet Sri Lanka, Lonely Planet Japan and DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Top 10 New York City all charting above it.
Phrasebooks had a particularly rough ride in 2018, falling 10% in volume and 12% in value, after holding pretty steady in the first part of the decade. Perhaps language-learning apps such as Duolingo—which reported in 2018 that more than a million of its users were learning to speak Welsh, double the number that claimed to speak it in the 2011 census—are eating into the Phrasebook subcategory. The bestselling Phrasebook title of the year was Lonely Planet Spanish Phrasebook & Dictionary, in 30th place in the chart, and 19% down in volume terms on 2017’s top seller Lonely Planet Fast Talk Italian.