Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast.

Me, Simon Corner, is Friday the 4th of July.

The day after the Newsweek New Destination Summit in London,

could the guidebook be making a comeback?

That's been one of the items on the agenda.

We're living in an age where if you want to find out

how to spend an afternoon in Florence, well, chat GPT or any other AI provider will be glad

to come up with an itinerary for you. So what place does the guidebook have? And how are guidebooks changing? Those are questions

for René Frey. He is the chief executive of Rough Guides and Inside Guides. The guidebook is getting

better by the year, right? Because we're working very hard to bring up new ideas, new content,

new Hayden champs, new hidden gems,

new series for different generations.

So it's a challenge, but on one side, we may not lose what we have,

which are excellent sources of curated content,

but we also have to find new ways and new content for other audiences,

like younger people, Gen C. I call them TikTok books, right?

And we're just publishing a new series next month. It's the London season and London modes,

which are like the start of our I call on TikTok books. It's just books which are short,

snappy, with absolutely hidden recommendations that you wouldn't expect to see.

Well, tell us more about London Moads.

We're actually talking here on the 34 floor of the charge in London, looking out over a tower bridge and the city.

What do you mean by London? Surely anyone who's a tourist in London is probably in a good move. Oh, absolutely. I have an excellent out today because it was a wonderful event here. I think London Moads is offering creativity depending on your mood. You want to have a coffee in a bookshop, right? We'll give you something that you wouldn't expect.

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