Page 191 - Electronic Commerce

Chapter 3

the book themselves and were surprised by how many copies they sold. More than three dec-
ades and 60 million books later, their publishing enterprise has turned out to be one of the most
successful in history.
The Wheelers’ publishing company, Lonely Planet, has grown rapidly, with typical annual
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sales increases of 15 percent or more. In 2007, BBC Worldwide purchased a 75 percent own-
ership interest in the company and purchased the rest of the company’s stock in 2011. Lonely
Planet TV now produces a variety of travel and documentary programs that appear on cable
networks throughout the world. As a BBC subsidiary, the company does not release sales fig-
ures, but industry analysts estimate current annual revenues to be over $100 million.
The company has more than 500 employees who perform editorial, production, graphic
design, and marketing tasks. However, most of the content that goes into the travel guides
and other media produced by the company is written by a network of more than 200 contract
authors in more than 20 countries. These authors are knowledgeable about everything from visa
regulations to hotel prices to the names of the hottest new entertainment spots. The combined
expertise of the in-house staff and the in-country authors has kept Lonely Planet ahead of its
competitors for many years.
Lonely Planet also offers travel services that include a phone card, hotel and hostel room-
booking, airplane tickets, European rail travel reservations and tickets, package tours, and travel
insurance. These services are sold by telephone and on the Lonely Planet Web site.
The Web site has won numerous awards, including the Society of American Travel Writers
Silver Award and a spot on Time magazine’s “Fifty Best Web Sites” list. The site was launched
in 1994 and includes an online store that sells Lonely Planet publications. However, the site’s
main draws are its comprehensive collection of information about travel destinations and its
Thorn Tree travel forum, which attracts more than 100,000 posts each month. The company has
not been able to generate any significant revenue from these site features.
Despite its excellent Web site and its introduction of new technologies, most of Lonely Pla-
net’s revenues are still generated by book sales. The typical production cycle of a travel guide is
about eight months long. This is the time it takes to commission authors, conduct research,
work through several drafts of writing and editing, select photos, create the physical book, and
print it. This production cycle causes new books to be almost a year out of date by the time they
are published. Only the most popular titles are revised annually. Other titles are on two-, three-,
or four-year revision cycles. The time delay in publication means that many details in the guides
are outdated or wrong; restaurants and hotels close (or move), exchange rates and visa regula-
tions change, and once-hot night spots are abandoned by fickle clientele.
Lonely Planet publications are well researched and of high quality, but the writers do not
work continually because the books are not published continually. The Web site often has infor-
mation that is more current than the published travel guides. Lonely Planet has adopted some
new technologies, but has not used them to change its revenue model in any major way or to
make basic changes in the production of its main product, the travel guides.

Required:
1. Review the company’s offerings for mobile devices. Evaluate those products and identify
opportunities for other products or services that the company could offer for mobile devices
and address customers’ concerns about the timeliness and currency of information in the
printed travel guides.

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