Lonely Planet has proven to completely understand social media and the potential of location-based mobile applications for their sector. Their traditional city guides are now packed into location-based applications for the iPhone (great move!). To activate this new product, they've cunningly used the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, announcing: Free iPhone guides for stranded travellers. This kind of generosity can surely count on a lot of free publicity in social media (TY @lamazone on Twitter for the tip), that's for sure. Simply everybody can install the city guides via the app store, but please beware that the free versions of the city guides expire on April 22 (which fits the story that it's for the stranded travellers who will likely be back home by then). A cunning plan that got executed pretty swiftly.
Let it be clear that I'm fascinated by location-based mobile applications. What FourSquare and Gowalla are doing at this time, is obviously just a glimpse of what's to come.
It's a no-brainer to see that location-based mobile applications have a great future in tourism. When you're enjoying a city trip, you don't want to carry around tons of books and guides. It's impractical to carry around all that extra weight and it immediately sorts you out as a tourist (and we don't want that do we? 
). Moreover, most city trippers seek instant gratification. When being at a certain spot in the city, I can imagine you want to know what's of interest nearby from where you are standing (depending on your status -- hungry, thirsty,... for information). A location-based mobile app can give you this info effortlessly. Never lost again.
LP's city guides can surely come in handy, that's for sure. However, I hope that these city guides will grow out to be more social in the future. Currently there are no share options yet. And in my opinion, next to the editorial content, the guides can surely benefit from user-generated content (reviews, ratings, comments, picture uploads, etc.). But I'm sure, they've already thought about all this, cunningly clever as they've proven to be at Lonely Planet.
There's 1 application per destination. Just like the pocket books. I guess that's because they're easier to sell individually then with different destinations bundled in 1 app.
Anyway, to conclude, I've added 2 screenshots of the Paris app, because people tell me I should add more pictures to my blog posts. But to find out more about these apps, go check 'em out in the app store!
