The book that was for many years a travellers' bible turns 50 this year. But with instant information available anywhere, how will Lonely Planet keep up?

You'd think the whole world would have ditched paper by now, but the 50 year old Lonely Planet travel guide is still iconic enough to make a difference.

When Tony and Margaret Wheeler published their first Lonely Planet 50 years ago they were writing about places other guidebooks didn't go to.

Their early stories of travelling through Afghanistan and hitchhiking along the Khyber Pass inspired a generation of keen young travellers with a thirst for adventure.

Over the next five decades, 150 million Lonely Planets would be printed and translated into 33 languages.

But about 20 years ago the guide - no longer owned by the Wheelers - became less of an overlanders' bible and more of an established publishing business.

"I guess it's been a journey for the book," says NZ Herald travel writer Thomas Bywater. "The way you would pick up a Lonely Planet guide nowadays, it isn't the cover-to-cover Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It isn't the big fat bible, it's become a reference book."

"That's the way we travel now, you dip in and out of it that same way as a budget airplane ticket."

Lonely Planet has responded to the changes in the way travellers use guides with a full revision of its own book in what it calls one of its most radical redevelopments in its history.

Less about accommodation and other tourism business listings, the new version goes into the planning process and includes more detail on destinations and experiences.

It aims to update 230 guidebooks over two years.

Today The Detail looks at how travel guides have changed over five decades as well as the way people travel.

Despite the increased competition from other guidebooks, and the growth of Instagram and other digital media, Bywater says Lonely Planet has done a good job of staying popular.

"Definitely with a certain generation of traveller who has grown up with the guides," he says.

"I was in the Cook Islands in Aitutaki not that long ago and they've seen a huge influx of visitors recently. They're just got their Hawaiian Airline links, more directly links out from the other side of the Pacific, and the amount of people who I stopped and talked to and said they were in Aitutaki to see Tony Wheeler's favourite lagoon.

"They'd seen Tahiti and Bora Bora but they wanted to see the Cook Islands because it had been in the Lonely Planet."…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details