issued September 2004

Lonely Planet teams up with VisitBritain

Lonely Planet has joined forces with VisitBritain to launch a new series of guides to Britain for young people.

Aimed at 18 – 30 year old visitors, the partnership will enhance Britain’s reputation as a destination, particularly as 37% of first time visitors prefer to use recognised guide books, such as the Lonely Planet series, as their main source of information. VisitBritain and Lonely Planet will promote the new guides and youth marketing activity to over 800 youth and student travel professionals from more than 80 destinations at the World Youth and Student Travel Conference in Madrid from 12 – 18 September 2004.

Each 96-page guide has been written by Lonely Planet’s team of experts and covers fourteen of Britain’s cities, the top five things to see and do in our beautiful countryside, and popular culture from music and fashion to film, literature and sport.

Nearly nine million 16 to 34-year olds come to Britain every year, staying for twelve days on average and together spending £4.6 billion. Equally important are the increasing numbers of international students choosing to learn at British schools and universities. The new guides are a significant part of VisitBritain’s activities to boost travel to Britain by these particular visitors.

Nathan Clapton, Lonely Planet’s Business Development Director, says “This project has been very close to the hearts of many of us at Lonely Planet. When Visit Britain asked us if we could produce guides promoting Britain with one of our key audiences, the global youth market, we were very excited to take the project on. These guides are about making Britain accessible and relevant, the versions produced for different markets and in different languages have sections relevant to each market. Lonely Planet has a long and deep relationship with travellers between 18 and 30 and we are as keen to encourage young people to travel to Britain as to the far-flung outer reaches.“

200,000 copies of the VisitBritain guide have been produced in seven languages – English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and for the first time, Polish – for distribution in 13 countries around the world. The guides will be complemented by a dedicated area on the ‘experience’ section of VisitBritain’s website, www.visitbritain.com/, which launches in October.

Lonely Planet is the world’s largest independent guidebook publisher. producing award-winning guidebooks for independent travelers for over 30 years, Lonely Planet are renowned the world over for providing independent, honest and accurate travel information to suit all tastes and budgets, and with over 650 guidebooks, we have the world covered. For more information, check out our award-winning website at www.lonelyplanet.com.