Travellers' Checks | How to read travel guides in a time of coronavirus – wanderlust and more while we’re stuck at home
- Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Bradt, et al, are making a suitable case for travel-inspired lockdown content
- Plus, remembering two of Hong Kong’s earliest aviators, the Macdonald brothers
Guidebook publishers are taking a variety of stances in dealing with the shutdown of leisure travel.
Lonely Planet’s online shop is still plugging away with a raft of new travel guides and other books such as The Digital Nomad Handbook: Practical tips and inspiration for living and working on the road, and the more lockdown-friendly Global Chocolate Tour. Among the more surprising entries on the site’s top 20 bestsellers for this month are its guides to Italy and Japan.
The Fodor’s website has a good selection of virus-related travel articles, including dispatches from 20 of its locked-down contributing authors. It is “business as usual” at Trailblazer, while Rough Guides is basically just asking for financial support.
Much more proactive is Bradt Travel Guides, whose senior management has recently penned persuasive articles for National Geographic and The Telegraph on why we should all still be reading guidebooks. The publisher is also discounting its entire catalogue – which includes some good travel-writing anthologies – by 50 per cent.
Remembering the Macdonald brothers, Hong Kong’s first aviators
