Mobile navigators get Lonely Planet with Telmap

One of the inexorable trends of mobile has been the growth of navigation services. The market for Personal Navigation Devices has taken a hit from smartphones running navigation apps. Today, tourist guide powerhouse Lonely Planet has announced a further move into mobile by sealing a deal with mobile navigation developer Telmap.

What’s the story?

Telmap is one of the pioneers of mobile navigation – it’s a big deal in navigation apps and mapping. But Telmap has never relied heavily on applications, or app stores like the Apple Store or Android Market. It prefers to go out and make deals with other players, including white-label deals with mobile operators (which it prefers to app stores, as you can see in our recent report).

Today, it has announced that digital information from Lonely Planet tourist guides will now be fully integrated into the search, mapping and navigation services from Telmap. Lonely Planet has a genuinely vast catalogue of guides about countries and cities all over the world. From now on, when you run searches or request routes from Telmap, you’ll have the option of reading info from Lonely Planet about the area.

What we think?

I like this one. If you look at LocationPoint, a similar move from digital mapper NAVTEQ, you’ll see it’s entirely about advertising. It’s a good idea – serving ads for brands along with your map results – but this announcement here is a true value-added service. Rather than serve you advertising, Telmap offers you extra information and details about your location or destination.

Smart move from Lonely Planet as well. This isn’t the first move onto mobile from the tour guides – it was one of the launch apps for iPad, and so far this year we’ve seen them hunting for advertisers and attempting augmented reality on Android. But I honestly think this kind of deal is going to be more successful for it. Making yourself an indispensable part of other services is a great way to draw in revenue.