When I went on my very first backpacking trip I didn't know a lot about the process. I simply got a Lonely Planet book and made some very specific plans where I was going to go in what I considered at the time to be a very long vacation of a mere 19 days. I had no idea, due to the lack of the internet dominating all information, that 19 days is not a long backpacking trip at all.
I had planned to go to 5 different countries during that time and in the first 4 days I realized that if I wanted to pull this off I was going to be spending the entire time in transit. Therefore, I did the smart thing and completely abandoned my plan. The fact that a lot of the information in my Lonely Planet book was already wrong by the time I got there wasn't very helpful either. I suppose today the up-to-the-minute information that is available via the net is actually extremely helpful in this regard.
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These used to dominate the travel industry with no one else even coming close in comparison
Regardless of the mishaps I experienced in using the Lonely Planet books, there wasn't really any other options available at the time since emails to certain backpacking places would go largely unanswered and booking sites didn't really exist. If you did get someone to respond at all there was also the better than average chance that your booking wasn't actually going to be held despite the fact that it was promised that it would be.
The maps and detailed information about various cities was very valuable and this is why these books were so crucial in getting around. Keep in mind we didn't have Google Maps back then, or ever smartphones. Hell, I only met one or two people that were traveling with phones at all because they were unreliable and getting international service was really expensive. Basically they were a huge waste of time and money.
Virtually everyone you met had a Lonely Planet and it was just kind of expected that you have one. As far as the businesses were concerned, there was nothing better that could possibly happen for their business than to be featured in Lonely Planet. They dominated the travel industry but it would only be a few years later that they and every other paper-book oriented guide all but disappeared from existence.
Lonely Planet had a wonderful opportunity to be the first people to have a dominant website in the travel industry but (and this is just my presumption) due to the fact that doing so would directly compete with the sales of their books, they opted to not do so. They had a few forums that were set up and would encourage book users to participate in said forums, but very few people did so and travel sites such as TripAdvisor soon had a stranglehold on that market segment.
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Of course the sales of all books of all types was a dying industry by the time the mid 2000's rolled around and I'm one of those people that has not purchased a book in years but do own a Kindle and I think a lot of people are the same way. I agree that "real books" are superior to ebooks, but it's hard to argue with the convenience of being able to hold 100 books on something fits in your hand, has adjustable font size, and can hold hundreds of full books in it.
These days when I am traveling I will still see an occasional LP book in someone's hands but more often than not the book is a decade old and it actually the property of the hostel and it just sits on the shelf. I don't think anyone uses it as any sort of reference for information but simply picks it up out of boredom or to see how much things have changed since it was published. No one really uses it as any sort of reference for real information.
I liked Lonely Planet and it's nickname of the "travel bible" was absolutely true back in the day. I also really feel as though they as a company made a terrible mistake by not transitioning into the digital market sooner than they did. I do understand that doing so would have cut into their own profits in the early 2000's but I honestly believe that you would have to be a real dolt as an LP executive decision-maker to not see the writing on the wall at that point. The book industry in general, as well as the travel book industry, was dying a slow and then later rapid death.
These days all of the major travel guides are constantly for sale and as far back as 2013 the book company had a rapid turnaround in being sold for $121 million less than was paid for it a mere 2 years later. Once valued at nearly a half billion dollars, the company was recently sold for under $80 million and now that Covid has hit, the already struggling company is definitely on its last legs. Offices in the U.K. and Australia have been closed and their magazine operation is on hold and it is not known if it will be reopened.
The only remaining branch of Lonely Planet that still operates is the Thorn Tree travel forum, which boasts 600,000 users, but even if that number is true (and how they would determine it remains a mystery) these numbers pale in comparison to the amount of users that are regulars on other travel sites.
What once was the dominant force in travel advice has now become something that is rarely even talked about, let alone used. They really missed their chance by choosing to continue to focus on publishing when the rest of the world was already transitioning to digital. I have no idea why they chose the path that they did, but I think we can safely say that it was a mistake.