Lonely Planet blog

Hi – I’m Ken, the guy in charge of digital maps at Lonely Planet.

If you’ve ever used Google maps to research a far-flung travel destination, you will have discovered, to your dismay, that they often look rather sparse. Perhaps they look like this. If you’re extremely unlucky, you will even have encountered the dreaded “no maps at this zoom level” message.

We feel your pain. And to be serious, you shouldn’t have to feel that pain when browsing lonelyplanet.com since we obviously have fantastic maps for many of these places. We’ve already published them in our guidebooks.

So, it is my great pleasure to announce that we’ve added 250 of our guidebook maps to the Destination and Trip Planner sections of our website, all in places where we’ve deemed our maps more useful to travellers than those provided by Google. To make exploration easy, we’ve slipped them straight into the Google maps interface, so you can browse them just like you would any of the Google-provided maps on the site.

To get you started, here are a few to check out: Marrakesh, Vientiane, Addis Ababa, Kabul, Minsk, Vladivostok, Santiago de Cuba, Peshawar, Noumea, Haifa, Georgetown, Damascus, and Casablanca. Click on ‘Show map’ and you’ll see our maps straight away.

These maps are the beginning of our buildout. Over the next weeks and months we’ll be adding more and more maps to the site, until we reach the point where if Google doesn’t have the map, and Lonely Planet does, then you can find it on lonelyplanet.com.

Enjoy!

Hide 2 comments

1. April 22, 2009 penguinocanada Report this comment

   WHy thank yoou fellow Canadian;)

2. October 12, 2009 Anonymous Report this comment

   awegaw1.txt;2;5