Increased adoption of mobile devices and e-book readers has forced the changes, Kennedy told Computerworld Australia at the F5 Agility Forum on the Sunshine Coast. "The whole publishing industry has had massive disruption."

Lonely Planet had a Web presence since 1995, but the world has changed significantly since then, Kennedy said. "People want content on whatever device they pick up," he said. "It's really as simple as that. They want it geo-tagged and they want it really up to date."

The travel guide got a final push towards digital when BBC acquired the company in 2007. "They put a large investment into the digital space", beginning in 2008 with an overhaul of the Lonely Planet website, Kennedy said.

"The real hard part is how do you keep [content] as fresh as you can without going the Trip Advisor route where you're taking loads of different people's opinions," he said. Maintaining high quality is key to compete with companies like Frommers, which itself was recently acquired by Google, he said.