Google Is Buying Travel Company Frommer's Julie Bosman - New York Times
go to original August 14, 2012

Google will buy the Frommer’s brand from John Wiley & Sons in a deal that will further expand Google’s ambitions in the travel business.

Google will pay about $23 million, according to a person close to the deal who was not authorized to speak publicly about the terms.

Wiley, a 200-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., said it had agreed last week to sell all of its travel assets to Google, using the proceeds from the sale to bolster its trade, scientific, scholarly and educational businesses, among others.

In March, Wiley said it was putting Frommer’s up for sale, along with Webster’s New World and CliffsNotes. The publishing properties that Wiley intended to sell generate about $85 million in annual revenue, the publisher said.

In a surprise acquisition last year, Google paid $151 million for Zagat, a deal that promised to give Google a significant boost in local services. Marissa Mayer, then Google’s vice president for local, maps and location services (she recently became the chief executive at Yahoo), said the company would expand Zagat’s team of sales representatives, fact-checkers, contractors and reviewers, and continue to publish the slim red guidebooks that were so closely identified with the brand.

Frommer's was once the biggest brand in travel books. But, Lonely Planet came along and knocked it off its perch. Frommer's, as a brand, doesn't have much resonance with younger people. Perhaps Google will change that.

Evelyn M. Rusli contributed reporting.

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