Hold onto your old Fromme’rs guides – they could soon be museum pieces…
Google’s purchase of the respected Frommer’s travel guidebook brand could prove a harbinger for the printed guidebooks. Google is yet to announce its intentions for the Frommer’s group, which it has bought for an undisclosed sum, but it seems unlikely it will move into printed publishing in any serious way.
The former owner of Frommer’s, US-based John Wiley & Sons, announced this year it intended to sell assets including the Frommer’s brand in order to concentrate on technical and trade publishing.
Google has made big moves into the travel space, including launching a flight search engine late last year, and more recently buying the North American restaurant review site Zagat, but there is still much speculation over the company’s intentions.
The Frommer’s publishing business includes online travel publishing as well as the provision of online content and images for the websites of many other big travel brands. It remains to be seen whether the Frommer’s brand, which has been trusted by millions of travellers around the world, will be retained or swallowed up by Google.
This article is an excerpt from Jane E. Fraser’s weekly travel column in The Sun Herald, Sydney.
