Why is the BBC flexing media muscle in the travel market?
Last November I wrote a piece outlining the worrying implications of the BBC’s acquisition of Lonely Planet for the Corporation’s non-commercial UK neutrality. I’m not the only travel journalist with these sorts of doubts. The BBC Royal Charter and Agreement, remember, is very clear on how the Beeb can and cannot interact with the UK media market:
The Agreement requires all commercial activities undertaken by the BBC to comply with four criteria. …
4. comply with BBC fair trading guidelines and in particular avoid distorting the market.
Of course, that begs a whole series of questions, but this much is plain: BBC Worldwide activities that distort a domestic market in which the corporation is a player are forbidden. This, essentially, was the basis for the decision to disallow BBC investment in ultra-local video last year. It’s the reason that the BBC’s acquisition (through BBC Worldwide) of Lonely Planet should be reversed at the first opportunity.
The opportunities for LP–BBC print cross-promotion are blatant enough. Shiny new Lonely Planet Magazine’s launch issue featured a story by Stephen Fry, that tied in with his fine …in America book and series. The second issue has David Attenborough in “The land that time forgot“, the Galapagos. I wonder how easy a non-BBC subsidiary would find it to commission a travel feature from either of those two. Unlike, say, Top Gear Magazine, this is a market segment in which the BBC had zero presence until November 2007.
As I predicted in my previous piece, both issues have been light on advertising. In rotten market conditions, Lonely Planet Magazine has an ace up its sleeve: BBC magazines are able to buy market share by taking a hit on profitability, in the short term at least. Strategies like that aren’t so readily available to small commercial players like Wanderlust.
But these advantages are trivial compared to the online expertise that Lonely Planet has bought into. The BBC runs the best news website in the world, at our expense. Three BBC Online experts were sent to LP’s Melbourne HQ immediately after that 2007 acquisition. The latest marketing wheeze, launched yesterday, is a travel module integrated inside BBC.com that provides access directly and exclusively into Lonely Planet hosted content (via). When it comes to social media, these digital marketeers know where the online travel information market is going:
Users will also be able to click through to the Lonely Planet site to discover a range of content and tools to plan, book and share travel experiences.
The feature is geo-coded, of course, and so only visible to overseas viewers. Oh, and any UK nationals who check BBC.com for the footie results when they’re on holiday. In any case, the idea that growing the worldwide brand power of Lonely Planet could fail to distort the domestic travel information market is naive. The 26m readers of BBC.com are being corralled into Lonely Planet for their travel information, at the expense of other UK-owned and -sited travel portals, among them struggling startups.
The travel guidebook market is worth something like £100m in UK retail book sales alone. Quite where the online market for travel information is going, nobody quite knows. But it’s safe to assume it can only grow. And with the massive, unfair advantage of BBC Online know-how behind it, taxpayers’ help in effect, it’s likely that Lonely Planet will shout so loud that other UK players barely get heard. Innovators with shallower pockets will be trampled or deterred from entering in the first place. Is this really what the BBC is for?
First published here.
2 comments
Great piece. Couldn’t agree more. I once wrote for Lonely Planet (co-authored 25 books over 4 years with my husband) but stopped writing for them for a tonne of reasons. While the argument you’ve presented wasn’t one of them, now that I write for Footprint, Rough Guides and DK, and understand and appreciate how they operate, I better see LP’s unfair competitive advantage over those guides, and now Wanderlust with the magazine.
LP should benefit enormously from BBC’s digital expertise – LP have sunk millions into their website over recent years, but it’s always failed – aside from Thorn Tree, which is a beast of its own – they’ve never been able to grasp the potential of digital, and have exploited their own content in a way that hasn’t been smart at all.
When I see content I wrote years ago come out in stories in newspapers under my by-line and yet it’s simply been lifted from our guides, and not only have bad selections been made, but it’s out-dated, a questions of ethics arise for me regarding their relationships with writer. For one, using old outdated content impacts our credibility as writers if readers (and editors) are imagining it’s recently been written by us and they recognized it’s old and bad. Secondly, they are in effect competing with us in our marketplace by giving away content presented as our articles to publications we occasionally write for – why would an editor accept a pitch for a story by me on Buenos Aires nightlife and pay me for it when Lonely Planet can simply lift it from my book and give it to him for free.
What’s more frustrating is that while millions are spent on websites and taking losses on the new magazine, writers are still getting paid lousy fees (so I hear). And even though I no longer write for them, I’m still trying to get paid for destination videos my husband and I presented for Lonely Planet TV 3 years ago… I can’t imagine that some of those unfair and ethical practices would sit well with the BBC… or the UK government.
Thanks for stopping by, Lara. I’ve never worked for LP myself, and generally have a good impression of them viewed from the outside (e.g. I heard their author fees were better-than-average?). As for whether sitting inside the BBC will change much about LP’s culture, I’m not sure. A commenter at the place the piece was run originally said dealing with the BBC, as a “small-guy”, was virtually indistinguishable from working with a Murdoch company… In fact, he marginally preferred Murdoch.
As you said, my main point is about the BBC: what is it for? Not for this, I suggest.
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