SYDNEY, Australia -- Long known as a worldwide information source on budget hotels and cheap eats, travel-book publisher Lonely Planet is venturing into new territory by offering low-cost, global telecommunications.
Aiming to leverage its brand name with independent travelers, Lonely Planet is bundling free email, voicemail services, and international telephony.
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By the end of the year, Lonely Planet plans to offer low-cost international calls from 60 countries and a package of on-the-road telecommunications services.
Travelers on a budget have previously had to rely on Internet cafés for email and pay hotel prices or buy prepaid phone cards for long distance. And they may have had no way at all to get voicemail, said Lonely Planet spokeswoman Anna Bolger.
By combining all the services in one package, independent travelers can easily touch base with travel buddies, make plans to meet up down the road, and keep in contact with Mom and Dad, who might not have a clue about how to send email.
The youth-oriented budget-travel publisher had been searching for new services to offer its peripatetic customers when eKorp.com -- a San Jose, California-based telecom start-up -- pitched a plan to create a co-branded communications product.
Since late May, Lonely Planet and eKorp have offered telephony from 37 countries to more than 200 countries through a joint venture called eKno. Subscriptions are available at the eKno Web site, which also provides free email.
EKorp spokeswoman Christie Harris said travelers worldwide spend an estimated US$10 billion annually on communications.
Lonely Planet and eKorp are planning to introduce additional services, such as converting email messages to voicemail, or distributing updated travel and visa news.
Say you were trekking through Nepal and couldn't get to an Internet café, she explained. "You can flag email sent to your address to be converted to voicemail messages. Or you could have anything with the words 'mom' or 'money' converted to voicemail."
To Paul Budde, an independent Sydney, Australia-based telecommunications analyst, the deal offers nothing terribly new. Its genius is in creatively packaging a series of existing telecommunications products and targeting them at a specific subgroup, he said.
"Since these two organizations don't have a long background in the bureaucratic world of telecommunications, they just built a product devised around a particular market," Budde said. "It's the same kind of thinking that now allows you to buy bread at a service station."
Lonely Planet was started by two Melbourne, Australia travelers who wanted to spread advice to friends about overseas locations. Originally distributed as photocopies, the travel tips turned into guide books and, eventually, a publishing empire.
Lonely Planet also lends its name to a travel-oriented television documentaries, and Bolger said the company would like to move deeper into communications and electronic services.
