The Death of the Travel Writer?

The death of the travel writer has been proactively announced by Tom Robbins of the financial times. Somewhere between imminent sprawling epitaph and predictive coroners report he outlines the travel guide writer as a dying breed. So who's to blame?

Well the first word on every Luddite's lips would be the correct one: technology. As many newspaper journalists fear their survival in the new world it would seem another casualty may be slipping quicker. While there is naturally an influx of travel blogs and so forth providing once bought information for free, there is another phenomena threatening the health of the guide book writer.

Specifically it is the new world of technological opened up by smart phones, with their hand held access to internet and a glowingly integrated main frame of technology, and it seems a new Google app may be a bearing nail in the guide book writers career trajectory.

While the appeal of the travel guide relied on its easy proximity to its reader, potentially attached at all times, quick to dispense information at a flick of a page, it looks as though Google have taken a rather substantial step to rendering them all but obsolete.

I recall a friend's mother forever mispronouncing Google as 'goggle', much to my friend's dismay, now Google have an app that will probably confuse her even more. 'Google goggles', or as my friend's mother may say 'goggle goggles', is a new app that allows tourists to simply take a picture from where they stand, and wait for suggestions to appear based on image recognition. You could be stood outside one of the Lanzarote villas, and quickly have your photograph annotated with destinations nearby, your trajectory to the attraction shown on the image.

At your fingertips therefore is almost all the information possibly written in any guide book, implementing the resource of the web perhaps even more. It goes beyond telling you where to go, you can snap a church and quickly your phone will be able to give you any interesting information the net has to offer on the subject of your photograph.

The implications are big enough to be quite scary, an interactive guidebook that is pageless, and yet the most comprehensive to ever be composed.

What's more it talks, through the handy Google translate feature you can speak a sentence in to your phone and it will say it any number of languages, as yet no lonely planet guide has managed that.

Most disturbingly for the travel guide industry is that all this technology is available for free. Simply download the app to your smart phone and it is up and running, fully functional.

But yet the travel guide industry has for a while been eating itself from within, exposes have been published and secrets have been aired sometimes gleefully, others reluctantly. If the travel writer is dying then Thomas Kohnstamm's 2008 book may suggest where they are headed, as he ponder Do Travel Writer go to Hell? While the book relishes in sordid detail of his various exploits in South America as an underfunded travel writer, other travel writers have also confessed to a lack of funding and desk research of locations.

So perhaps the guidebook is dying, but it has been diseased for a while.