I’ve used Lonely Planet for a long time. Back in the 1990s they were often the only halfway-reliable (1) source of information about out-of-the-way places, but I think I’ll probably never buy one again.

Firstly, the books are almost unreadable on a Kindle: the pages are too small to get much text on; the maps are unintelligible; and I found it very hard to find what I was looking for. Each town or city typically only has a single entry in the table of contents, and the fact that they put the accommodation first means that you have to spend a long time paging through to get to any information about how to get there, or what to do when you’ve arrived.

I almost gave up on Lonely Planet in northern Chile after following their helpful instructions in the Atacama Desert section for getting onto one of the free tours round an observatory. After getting a confirmation we had a place booked I checked Google Maps to find that the recommended observatory was over 1,000 km to our south: about a 13-hour drive away. I complained and they sent me an automated thank-you note with a voucher for 15% off my next purchase of a Lonely Planet. Thank you, but no. I get that it must be incredibly hard to survive in the time of TripAdvisor, AirBnB, and all the hotel booking websites, but you’re really not helping yourselves.

The next nail in the coffin came somewhere in Ecuador, when I realised how much the style differs between individual books. Each edition has had some degree of internal consistency, but this goes out of the window when you cross a border. The northern Peru section was pretty consistent about giving estimated times and prices for bus journeys between cities, but that suddenly disappeared when we moved to Ecuador. And whoever thought it was a good idea to describe a bar as having a “ghetto grotto” feeling, grow up and get a proper editor.

If anybody’s listening, you could really have helped me by having accurate information about how to get across land borders in South America. I managed to find the Piura-Loja crossing, for example, by looking at where I could get to from Loja in the Ecuador edition, but there was nothing about it in the Peru one. Then rework the format to work on a Kindle, tighten up the editing within and across books, and there might be a chance you’ll still be in business in ten years.

[1]: I vividly remember our gradual realisation, in the middle of Irkutsk on a December evening, that the whole Siberian section of the 1998 Russia edition had clearly been written by somebody who’d only been there in summer, and didn’t see the need to add the caveat that some, or indeed all, of the places they mentioned might close for the entirety of winter.