The Latest From Lonely Planet

It’s been 25 years since Lonely Planet guidebook founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler wrote “Across Asia on the Cheap” from their kitchen table in Sydney, Australia. The guidebook empire that evolved from their hand-stapled, 96-page tome now covers the world from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. And Lonely Planet has become one of the most authoritative sources of travel information in cyberspace, supplying destination profiles to America Online, Yahoo! and Travelocity, as well as to the publisher’s own extensive Web site (https://www.lonelyplanet.com).

Unlike its Rough Guides competitor, Lonely Planet doesn’t reproduce books in their entirety online. The Web site encompasses about 200 destinations, just 65% of the series’ total, and the truncated reports don’t include any lodging or restaurant information.

But while Lonely Planet’s print guidebooks are only revised on a two-year cycle, a team of 10 Web site staffers updates the online destination profiles every three to six months. The Indonesia section, for example, includes information on the currency crisis that began last summer, while the Mexico guide was revised to incorporate warnings about unlicensed taxicabs in Mexico City and political tension in Chiapas.

For more current news, there’s Scoop, a weekly compendium of advice and updates. Some are useful (a recent report on post-Pol Pot Cambodia, with links to travel advisories from Australia, Britain, Canada and the U.S.), while others are simply amusing. Among the latter: A report on Cafe Keilu, a new Tel Aviv restaurant that serves no food or drinks but charges $6 per person to order from a pretend menu.

The Web site also capitalizes on Lonely Planet’s legendary interaction with its readers. The Thorn Tree, a lively discussion area described as “a Web-hang for travelers to share know-how and no-way,” generates thousands of e-mails a month. The 16 categories cover broad destination regions as well as topics geared to women, gay men and lesbians, people traveling with children and those seeking a travel companion.

Response to posted queries is typically swift. Two days after asking whether independent hikers along the Inca Trail could find natural water sources along the way, the Thorn Tree questioner had received three replies--including one from a hiker who’d returned from Peru a few days earlier and noted: “We never hiked more than a couple of hours without seeing locals selling Coca-Cola and beer.”

For all its strengths, navigating Lonely Planet’s site can be irksome. With no search engine, finding information on a specific topic often means scrolling through multiple screens. And while the excerpts from Lonely Planet’s travel literature series are engaging, the graphics-heavy presentations seem geared more to Web designers than to time-pressed readers. Lonely Planet’s Web site editors say a search feature is in the works--along with more information on U.S. destinations. Launching this month: city profiles on New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. In the meantime, the site remains one of an independent traveler’s best starting points.

Small bytes: Travelers shopping for airline tickets at Microsoft’s Expedia site (https://www.expedia.com) can now book accommodations through Hotel Reservations Network, a hotel consolidator that offers more than 400 hotels in 17 cities at discounts up to 65% off published rates. . . . The new version of DeLorme’s popular Map n Go trip planner CD-ROM (Windows, $39.95) includes 1998 information on AAA-rated lodgings, restaurants, campgrounds and attractions, plus a slide show feature that lets users create and e-mail their own digital images.

Bly welcomes reader comments; her e-mail address is Laura.Bly@latimes.com. Electronic Explorer appears monthly.