Executive Summary

Fodor's Travel, a division of Random House, Inc., has been recognized as the premier guidebook publisher for more than 70 years. Today, the Fodor's Travel brand exists firmly in print, online, and on mobile devices.

Fodor's target audience is what Publisher Tim Jarrell calls "age 25-plus travelers who are interested in attainable luxury." The huge array of print guidebooks and the Fodors.com website are resources that the Fodor's audience uses to discover the best places within their budget to stay, eat, shop, and explore.

Fodor's Travel publishes guidebooks-- 14 different series that include about 450 separate titles that cover 300 destinations worldwide—and sells more than a million units a year. The company hosts a website, Fodors.com and also provides mobile applications that customers can add to their mobile devices. Product development depends on the product. "We're certainly defining what it means to be Fodor's content," says Jarrell, "Then, we use that as a prism through which we evaluate everything that we do." For digital content, Fodor's often works with partners, such as Garmin or Expedia, to develop products.

Fodor's Travel launched Fodors.com in 1996 "just as the World Wide Web was beginning its dramatic expansion," according to the publishing company. Shortly thereafter, Fodor's began to "nuggetize" its text by requiring its editors, writers, and updaters to reformat the entire content of every book into "minimum information units," where each bit of content the contributors and updaters produced was written and tagged as a stand-alone unit that could be created once and used, repackaged, repurposed, and re-monetized elsewhere—over and over again. "Nuggetizing was critical in allowing us to shoot our content out to the Web, as well as to our licensees," says Jarrell.

The company posts free content from many of its guidebooks on Fodors.com and supplements that content with general travel advice, the offer of a free weekly email newsletter, and a community for registered users with areas such as discussion forums and user-generated ratings for hotels and restaurants.

"We're now entering the next phase of our website development," he adds, "where we believe we need original online content. We realize that the Web can do certain things better than print in terms of providing information, so we are now investing in creating original content for the Web."

Fodor's generates revenue from its vast array of travel guidebooks that are sold in brick-and-mortar bookstores, online at either Fodors.com or RandomHouse.com, and through third-party e-retailers such as Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. Fodor's also licenses content to various partners, both online and offline, and that has become a valuable piece of business for the publishing company.

"Online, I would say that, overwhelmingly, we are ad-driven," says Jarrell. Fodor's digital income comes mostly from ad sales but also from content licensing and e-commerce affiliate programs, the relationship with Expedia's booking engine being the primary example. Fodor's receives a percentage of all bookings on Expedia that are generated through Fodors.com.