What is the future of travel content?
Skift recently interviewed the CEO of Lonely Planet (video) about the future of travel content. Many topics came out of it. It's certainly worth a view.
I remember a few years back when people said the iPad would revolutionize peoples travel experience with interactive magazines, apps and so forth.
Tablets: Though tablets today are certainly wildly popular I've not seen any revolution in travel. Where are the interactive magazines? The Virtual Travel Apps?
Magazines: What I saw was a meek outing of magazines that were basically cut and paste from print versions. KLM is the only one that embraced "interactive" magazines but by gosh is it slow to load.
Print: is on the decline but still profitable in terms of guidebooks.
Kindle: The e-reader Kindle is terrible for guidebooks but great for packing lots of reading material on holiday.
Apps: Travel Apps surged in the beginning but ... was there anything revolutionary? I personally have yet to find a travel guide app that's any good. Booking apps are about as good as it gets.
WiFi: Widespread internet access seems to have had a more beneficial effect that anything with innovation attached to it. Perhaps this is why TripAdvisor, Wikitravel/Voyage websites continue to do well? But advertising revenue is constantly in a state of flux.
Sponsored: Sponsored travel content constantly raises the ire of many and yet is praised as a savior by others. Creating original content is often expensive and there have been many cases of desk bound travel writers simply calling the work in.
So, where exactly are we headed with travel content? And what do people think the future holds for travel content?
(edit: added some highlights)