Dec 2009
for BBC Worldwide

Lonely Planet

The brief:

Transform lonelyplanet.com into the online bible for digitally native travellers.

Poke’s answer:

A living, breathing property that’s dynamic, reactive and relevant to every person that visits the site. In an era of UGC, crowd sourced rating and reviewing, it embraced emerging behaviours as well as retaining the authority of the brand.

Nitty gritty

We designed a fresh, new ecosystem to encourage UGC to flourish and complement Lonely Planet’s highly respected editorial. The content was restructured in modular form to allow easy porting to applications and third parties, while a suite of tools enabled users to discover and explore destinations, plan trips and share experiences. Facebook, Twitter and traditional forums were integrated to make it more penetrable, opening up the existing ‘Thorntree’ community to a wider audience.

Visit the site: lonelyplanet.com

Highlights

Getting briefed in January, in Melbourne while London froze over. 
Watching this enormous beast that we’d spent a year defining and designing come to life and really start to flow.
Creating one of the leading online travel destinations in the world.