National Geographic on Road to Global Empire

If you’ve ever cracked open one of those yellow-bordered magazines, odds are good that you’ve been taken on a virtual voyage or two by the people at the National Geographic Society. But virtual travel isn’t enough for them anymore.

After 111 years of magazine publishing and a few decades of documentary filmmaking, National Geographic is wading into the business of travel. Working with outside partners, the nonprofit society and its for-profit wing, National Geographic Ventures, are selling guidebooks, escorted tours, driving atlases, hikers’ maps and a new youth-oriented adventure-travel magazine, National Geographic Adventure.

“It’s a natural evolution,” says the society’s president and CEO, John M. Fahey Jr., who cites the organization’s original mission “to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge.” If this move works, the society will boost revenue ($509 million last year), widen its influence and establish National Geographic as an outfit that will not only fuel your daydreams about the wilds of Borneo, but show you the best jungle road, direct you to lodgings there and maybe even help you rub in some insect repellent.

For consumers, the proliferation of the society’s little yellow logo means a chance to draw more deeply from a remarkable information source. It also means that the society’s new competitors, from map makers to tour operators, will likely be looking again at their own products, and perhaps upgrading them. (This has already begun: After National Geographic came out in late 1997 with its first U.S. road atlas that also included a detailed topographic relief, rival Rand McNally introduced its own deluxe topographic road atlas.)

But all this diversification does make some admirers (and employees) of National Geographic nervous. Is the outfit making money in order to sell geography or selling geography in order to make money? Can all these partnerships keep up the society’s reputation for top-notch work?

Some readers may be surprised to find that much of the advice in the National Geographic Trip Planner Platinum 2000 CD-ROM is actually drawn from a Frommer’s guidebook series. Other readers, dipping into the new National Geographic Adventure magazine, may be perplexed by the events calendar on page 67, which is folded inside a four-page Jeep advertisement and, with its ultra-hip, hard-to-read typography, can easily be mistaken for an ad itself. This is not the kind of thing found in the beloved magazine that staffers call “Old Yeller.”

Insiders say the drive to push National Geographic into new arenas began with the 1996 arrival of Reg Murphy, a veteran newspaper editor, as the organization’s president. Murphy in turn consulted with society chairman Gilbert M. Grosvenor in choosing Fahey, a former top editor at Time-Life Books, as his own successor.

“We’re trying to reach as many people as we possibly can,” says Fahey. The bottom line, whether the product is a book, a CD-ROM or a magazine, Fahey adds, is “to make sure the standard of what we offer is better than anybody else’s out there.”

Among the travel-related products bearing that National Geographic logo these days:

* Guidebooks: The society has dipped its toe into the guidebook pond before, publishing a handful of U.S. driving guides and a few paperbacks on U.S. national parks and historic places. Now, drawing on the editing and design of England-based Automobile Assn. Developments Ltd., the society is taking on the world. Beginning this month with six of the planet’s most popular destinations (France, Britain, Canada, Paris, London and New York), the National Geographic Traveler paperback guidebook series is rich with photography, maps and historical context, with brief listings of hotels and restaurants. Plans call for books on 10 new destinations each year for the next three years. Prices run $22.95 to $27.95.

* Tours: National Geographic’s first foray into tour operating was the National Geographic on Tour program, born in the early 1990s. Now that effort has been replaced by the more ambitious National Geographic Expeditions, telephone (888) 966-8687, which aims to offer more trips to a wider variety of destinations (with closer ties to recent magazine stories), and with a greater emphasis on Geographic writers, photographers and other experts who will join tour groups. This month, a mailing will go to hundreds of thousands of society members announcing the new program. Its catalog includes 13 trips between Sept. 1 and February 2000. Most tours (to be operated by Academic Travel Abroad and other veteran tour companies) will run eight to 21 days and cost $2,400 to $7,300. (There is also a millennium splurge: a 21-day Antarctica voyage, priced at $11,500 to $16,000.)

* Road atlases and hiking maps: In 1997 the society published its first road atlas, drawing on a pact with Geosystems Global Corp., the company behind the popular Internet site Mapquest. Now in its second edition, the atlas has been a big sales success. But the society’s for-profit arm is aiming at pedestrians too. Last year, National Geographic Ventures bought Trails Illustrated, publisher of national park maps. That move marked Geographic’s first outright acquisition of another company. Now the Trails Illustrated maps bear both logos, and 15 national park maps are on sale in a CD-ROM form that lets hikers customize routes.

* Magazines: National Geographic Adventure, the fourth magazine introduced in the group’s history, is far less scholarly than the society’ flagship magazine, with profiles of rock climbers, rundowns on outdoorsy destinations and consumer reviews of outdoor gear. Its top editor, John Rasmus, was a founding editor of Outside and Men’s Journal.

Meanwhile, National Geographic Traveler, a 15-year-old magazine with about 715,000 circulation, was redesigned in January to attract younger readers and cover more foreign destinations.

Christopher Reynolds welcomes comments and suggestions, but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053, or send e-mail to chris.reynolds@latimes.com.