Tom Hall of Lonely Planet Discusses its Travel Podcast with WPF

As someone who has traveled a far share in the third world using Lonely Planet travel guides, the idea of an LP podcast sounds great. As country travel guides get updated only once every year or so, podcasting seems like a great way to get updated real-time information to the traveler. Right?

LP has always been tech-savvy, and has looked for ways to leverage its website and on-line communities to enhance user-experience and its business.

Back in May 2005, seeing that podcasting was growing in popularity, the on-line team of LP decided to experiment with bringing the sites and sounds of travel to listeners via a podcast. The first podcast was launched in September 2005 and covered St. Petersburg Russia.

By the second episode, the LP podcast shot up the iTunes charts, catching the team by surprise. But it became immediately clear that while innovation was nice, success required a higher commitment to professionalism in order to attract the user: compelling and suitable content, recording equipment, editing, etc. Working out the correct working relationships with the writers/contributors (who does what) took time as well.

Today, LP employs personnel dedicated to podcasting, whose role is to select stories and commission/handle author relations.

Is podcasting here to stay at LP? One of the barriers that podcasting must overcome is the text-orientation of LP and its customers. LP, like newspapers and other publications, sell text. Thus a major hurdle to overcome is "we sell text so why do audio?" Equally important, travelers use books, and text is more convenient than audio in most travel scenarios.

Thus the key is identifying the scenarios where podcasting is compelling to travelers, and how podcasting can complement LP's business, not replace it. And judging by LP's ability to release great podcasts since 2005, LP has found the sweet spot.