BOOKS
Market Focus Travel
Travel sales continue to slide but maps manage to find their way back to growth
The latest statistics show that the Travel category continues to experience a decline in volume and value... but there are a few silver linings to be found in the gloomy outlook
NEW YORK WAS POPULAR WITH UK TRAVELLERS
Museum guides—for Duxford, Belfast (still technically in the UK, at the time of writing) and the North—followed in the top five. This military
Kiera O'Brien @kieraobrien
T
hrough Nielsen BookScan, Travel books aren’t exactly basking in sunshine. At
the moment, it’s less luxury villa and more like a drizzly Bank Holiday spent camping in a waterlogged tent. For 2019, the market was at 5.56 million books sold for £52.8m, a drop of 5.7% in volume and 4.6% in value year on year. This was the lowest in both respects for the Atlases, Maps and Travel BookScan category since full-market records began. Until 2018, the category had roughly managed to keep its head above water post-recession. Atlases, Maps and Travel suffered its harshest declines between its peak of £103m in 2007 to £59.8m in 2013, yet
from then onwards it managed to avoid any more cliff edges. In 2015 and 2016 it even posted marginal growth in value terms.
38 21st February 2020 5.56m
The number of Travel books sold last year
£52.8m
The value of Travel books sold in 2019 through the TCM
-5.7%
The drop in volume year to year
Yet, over the past three years, Travel has faltered again, falling nearly 12% over that time. Brexit, and a weak pound, can’t have helped—and it will be interesting to see how the market copes with its consumer base considering the prospects of European travel
WAR ROOMS IS PROVING TO BE A BIG HIT
WINSTON CHURCHILL’S
visas and unending immigration queues post-transition period— but the internet, and its content free-for-all, must have played a part too.
As always, we should keep in mind this is BookScan data only. We can’t size up the potential boost for digital titles or export sales for travel publishers. Perhaps in the
2020s Travel will rise to greet its challenges with fresh new angles. Already, the category’s entire top five are guides to UK-based destinations, with Churchill War Rooms at number one. The title sold 47,564 copies in 2019, rising an impressive 77% in volume year on year and leapfrogging the Imperial War Museum London Guidebook aſter a five-year streak in the overall number one spot. Three more Imperial War
THE GUIDE TO
history-heavy insight into Brexit- transitioning Britain isn’t
the most progressive of future outlooks. Interestingly, the usually top five-stalwart Eden Project: The Guide has been re-coded under Natural History: Plants and therefore no longer appears in the Travel charts. However, in a sense, 2019 wasn’t as gloomy a year for Travel as 2018. The previous year, only one sub-category posted either volume or value growth on 2017—Cycling Maps & Guides, which squeaked up 0.7% in value. Yet in 2019, the near-impossible happened—in an era in which
Category growth Performance since 2000
£120m £90m
£60m £30m
TCM VOLUME TCM VALUE
20m 15m 10m 5m
£103.3m (2007) RECORD YEAR
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