In 2006, my wife and I bicycled through six Southeast Asian nations over three months. During the first half of the journey, one resource we turned to was Lonely Planet’s Cycling Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. With detailed route information, including km-by-km directions, elevation charts, and cycle-centric destination info, this book was handy to say the least.

However, at three years old, it was already beginning to show signs of outdated-ness in a region where things change rapidly and sometimes unexpectedly. From my research, the book appeared to be a first and only edition, and given the fact that I wasn’t seeing any other LP cycling guides on the new release shelves, I figured the wave had passed.

Not so, says NYT’s In Transit blog. Apparently, after noticing that some of its old bike guides were fetching ridiculous sums on eBay, Lonely Planet made the call to revisit the series. New two-wheeled guides to Great Britain, France, and Italy are out now, with Australia and New Zealand coming soon.

Here’s to hoping the LP cycling writers return to Asia as well. Who knows — that might be all the inspiration I need to head back to Vietnam’s Highway 1.

For more on bicycle tours in Asia, check out Jon’s recent post: Asia on Two Wheels.

* Photo by reeveb.

It was announced today over at Lonely Planet that they are adding their guidebook maps to their online guides, a welcome addition to the otherwise truncated online guides that used Google Maps before.

However, a cursory look at the new addition shows that, curiously, the Google maps are still there, they’ve just added pushpins to various sights and attractions.

Not exactly a huge improvement. Wouldn’t it be better to use the Google maps but also to include links to the LP maps as they are seen in the print guidebooks (numbers and symbols with a key box next to it)? To me, the online map is too compressed (it’s just a small sliver at the top of the page) and good luck trying to figure out how to get to one point to another using it. I think LP should go back to the drawing board on this one. What are your thoughts? Bueller?

It seemed almost inevitable, but with travel down as much as much 10% in parts of the world and likely to erode further, everyone in the industry is facing cutbacks, and this includes Lonely Planet, which recently sent out this announcement to its employees announcing 40 “redundancies” (that’s British for getting axed) as guidebooks and advertising revenue plummets. As CEO Stephen Palmer explains, “It’s not you, it’s them”:

Lonely Planet continues to out-perform the market and build share, but the market has slumped. Even the most optimistic forecasts do not predict any sustained recovery until 2010 at the earliest, and even then it is likely to be slow and patchy. The UN World Travel Organisation forecasts that total outbound travel will fall 2% in 2009, but in our core markets they predict a fall by as much as 10% from the US, 5% from the UK and 2% from Australia. It has become clear that this economic situation is unprecedented, it will not just be a blip and we need to adjust our costs so we can manage through these tough times.

Here’s hoping things turn around soon and travel-junkies around the world are able to once again join the ranks of the working class and get paid to do what they know and love most.