Pauline Frommer, co-president and editorial director of FrommerMedia, is blunt about her company’s initial response to the pandemic. “We stopped the process,” she says. “We knew the world was going to change drastically, and we didn’t want to print books that were filled with errors. Manuscripts were due in April 2020; we contacted all the writers and said ‘let’s pause’ for what I thought was going to be a couple of weeks. We stayed paused until spring/summer 2021.”

In the seasons since, the world has taken tentative steps toward reopening, then walked them back again (rinse and repeat), and publishers of round-the-world guides have had to stay flexible while planning for the unknown. How is the industry surviving in the age of rolling lockdowns, vaccination checks, and 10-day quarantines upon arrival? PW spoke with travel publishers about navigating an ever-changing landscape and what their readerships want now.

Map quest

At the end of 2020, with the pandemic still in full swing, “We couldn’t put out our regular ‘Best Places to Go’ article [on frommers.com],” Frommer explains, “so instead we reached out to writers and asked them, What’s the best place to go in the U.S. to understand America?” Jodi Picoult contributed, as did Cheryl Strayed, Kim Johnson, and Susan Choi. Then, as 2021 wound down, Frommer staff looked ahead, compiling “The World’s Safest Places to Go in 2022.”

Travel publisher websites have a different tone these days: fewer hotel reviews, more health guidance. “What do people want to read about? Covid news and dog stories, and you can only write so many dog stories,” says Jeremy Tarr, digital editorial director at Fodor’s. “So it became: I went to X destination, and here’s what it’s like during the pandemic.”

Maintaining a strong brand in the absence of regular guidebook publication is no mean feat, publishers agree. “We paused the guide program for a year,” says DK Travel publishing director Georgina Dee. “It’s hard to be a travel guide publisher and not be publishing travel guides. We felt very strongly that travel would come back, and that we wanted to maintain our relationship with readers.” DK shifted focus to gift and inspiration titles, including USA National Parks (19,000 print copies sold, per NPD BookScan) and Unforgettable Journeys (almost 10,000 sold), and in October 2021 launched a series of slim, hardcover city guides titled Like a Local.

To some publishers, the pandemic is only pushing the travel market further along an existing path. “We’re breaking away from only doing traditional guidebooks,” says Allyson Johnson, senior editor at National Geographic Books. “The audience is starting to drift toward photo-driven coffee table books. We’re focusing on bucket list destinations—not books that will tell you where to go every second of your trip, but that will get you started on planning, such as 100 Hikes of a Lifetime.” The photo-heavy hardcover pubbed in February 2020, just before the pandemic took hold in the U.S., and has sold 24,000 print copies. “We were already leaning into this, but now we feel like we’re really going in the right direction.”

Wish you were here

Despite the challenges, publishers say, travelers are getting back out there. As they do, they’re finding a hospitality industry that’s eager to welcome them, though some destinations have fared better than others. “Because the French government subsidized so many businesses, Paris didn’t lose that many hotels and restaurants,” Pauline Frommer notes. She says the eighth edition of Frommer’s EasyGuide to Paris, due out in February, “hardly changed at all” from the previous version.

Independent travel champion Rick Steves is cheered to see how many small businesses in particular are still around. “There’s resilience in the little mom-and-pops who don’t have the resources of a chain,” he says. “With a combination of government help and local patronage, and a growing trickle of international travelers, they’ve survived the pandemic. I feared I’d be raking away the corpses of all these little businesses, but it doesn’t look like it. People are traveling in Europe who can’t go abroad—the French are going to the Riviera.”

And the Brits are exploring Great Britain, says Zara Sekhavati, senior editor at Insight Guides and Rough Guides. “Local titles have been selling very well,” she adds, citing the Rough Guides British Breaks series, which debuted in 2020 with destinations including Scotland’s Isle of Skye and the Western Isles, and the Rough Guides Staycations, a 2021 launch that highlights favorite locales such as England’s Cotswolds, Oxford, and Snowdownia and North Wales.

Interest in such books confirms the heartening notion that “wanderlust hasn’t disappeared,” says Allyson Johnson at National Geographic. “Getting out on the open road may return a sense not only of normalcy, but of the freedom that too many have been missing over the last two years.”

Home-field advantage

Publishers are also rethinking who is best suited to guide readers around a particular destination: a jet-setting professional or the writer next door? Rather than sending the usual suspects out to explore, guidebook editors are finding new talent at popular destinations. “We’re working more with local writers who live in the destinations,” Frommer says. “They’re embedded in those places and they have a deeper sense of how things are changing” during Covid.

Lonely Planet, too, is steering away from the traditional model, where the publisher flies a writer to a destination for four weeks, then flies them home, where they write the guidebook. “This wasn’t possible to achieve during the pandemic,” says Chris Zeiher, LP’s senior director of trade sales and marketing. Instead, the publisher has tapped writers to promote their own hometowns: the Experience series debuts in March with guides to a half-dozen countries including Italy and Japan; June brings books on six cities, Barcelona and Paris among them.

Having locals write the guides amps up the insider appeal, explains John Garry, a coauthor of Experience New York City. “We’re not just telling readers to go to this restaurant, eat that food, watch the sunset from this place,” he says. “We included a historic tour through Brooklyn Heights—the terra-cotta brownstones, a building that went from being a brothel to a home for Franciscan monks; and Plymouth Church, where the Underground Railroad went through.”

DK is building on its Like a Local series (tagline: “By the people who call it home”), adding guides to six U.S. and European cities in February. Also that month, Moon Travel will launch the 52 Things to Do guides, all written by residents—the first group includes Boston, Chicago, and Nashville—and conceived with locals in mind.

“We want people to be able to experience their own cities in a new way,” says Grace Fujimoto, v-p of acquisitions at Moon. She notes that the publisher’s strong domestic program meant it was well placed to weather Covid. “Right before the pandemic, Moon was making a concerted effort to do more in Europe and Asia, but we pulled back from that.”

Like other publishers, Fujimoto has hopes for a post-omicron world. “Outdoors and road trips always did well, and then around June 2021 we saw a noticeable increase in international,” she says. “I hope that means people are planning for sometime later this year.”

Liz Scheier is a writer, editor, and product developer living in Washington, D.C. Her memoir Never Simple will be published by Henry Holt in March.

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