Lonely Planet Operating System
Colorado
As awesome as this was, writing POI reviews and narrative text separately raised another problem: it had become difficult for authors and editors to maintain a sense context. Authors had lost the sense that they were creating a "thing", feeling their job had become simply feeding words into the maw of the machine. And without a sense of the relationship between geography, description and reviews, it became surprisingly easy to repeat or even contradict yourself.
Finally, although the publication of Colorado was an important proof point for the system, product curation required commissioning editors to learn and write XML, a hurdle would need to be removed before any full-scale transition to "L.P.O.S." as the default publishing platform for the business.
Concept
Execution
This let us do a lot of pretty sweet things we couldn't do before. As an author in the system, I can see exactly how many Italian restaurants I've reviewed in Melbourne and where. I can see if I've said Lygon St is great for espresso but forgotten to include more than a couple of cafés. More interesting still, I can find which hotels offer airport transfers by searching for 'airport' in the reviews of 'Sleeping' POIs.
Putting the tools in the hands of executives for an hour let them experience the ease and fun of product curation; a visceral demonstration which not only helped secure funding for the next round of development, but the confidence to green light a platform transformation that we'd been attempting as an organisation for the better part of a decade. The first of Lonely Planet's flagship titles will be built off of the LP Operating System in early 2012.
