Jen Rose Smith

THE WASHINGTON POST – Rick Steves is hyped. That’s not so unusual: Infectious joy is surely one key to Steves’s success as America’s kindly vacation guru. Still, when he leaves soon on a 40-day trip to update his European guidebooks – a ritual he used to perform each spring – it will be the first such journey since COVID-19 erased his travel calendar, which explains his current level of euphoria.

“Just to get back in the saddle has got me so filled with adventure, with energy,” he said. “I can hardly wait.” The trip follows a pandemic-long dry spell that quieted presses across the guidebook industry. United States (US) travel book sales in 2020 were down about 40 per cent from the previous year, according to NPD BookScan. (The category includes, but doesn’t single out, travel guidebooks.)

Facing stalled sales and the prospect of ongoing upheaval amid the pandemic, many guidebook print runs were postponed or canceled. “We put all the guidebooks on pause,” said Pauline Frommer, co-president of the guidebook company her father, Arthur Frommer, founded in 1957. “It was very clear from the beginning of the pandemic that things were going to change drastically, and I did not want to print guidebooks that were not worth the paper they were printed on.”

The pandemic knockdown came following uncertain decades for the guidebook industry. After reaching 19,005,029 in 2006, US travel book sales halved over the next decade. In 2013, BBC Worldwide sold Lonely Planet, a move followed by massive layoffs. Then, having acquiring Frommer’s, Google quietly stopped all production of Frommer’s print guidebooks. (The Frommers repurchased rights and resumed printing guidebooks.)

That’s how 2013 became the year of essays trumpeting the demise of travel guidebooks, each attributing cause of death to some combination of apps, influencers, online searches and digital powerhouse Tripadvisor. But the doomsaying was nothing new. “The whole time I’ve been working on guidebooks, people have been like, ‘The end of guidebooks is nigh’,” said author Zora O’Neill, who wrote her first travel guidebook in 2002 and has penned titles for both Moon and Lonely Planet.

Although the end never came, O’Neill saw the industry change. Rates have fallen or stagnated in the past two decades, while in many cases, work-for-hire arrangements replaced traditional royalty contracts. And the once-dominant role of guidebooks in travel culture changed, too.

As an old millennial who started travelling in guidebooks’ supposedly halcyon age, I’ve watched that transformation with interest. Sometimes with nostalgia, too: I miss swapping annotated, dog-eared books with fellow travellers in bars or hostels. Now, you can reliably find those same places filled with people glued to their screens.

Twenty years ago, however, I would have said guidebooks contributed to an informational monoculture I found aggravating. I noticed that people using the same brand of travel guides seemed to follow each other, slightly abashed, from place to place.

On one months-long trip through Central America in 2002, fellow owners of Lonely Planet’s hefty Central America on a Shoestring became familiar faces as we popped up at the same places in city after city. When new businesses opened, owners struggled to get the word out.

Lurid tales of questionable guidebook ethics circulated. Outdated or incorrect entries in a book could leave you stranded, but few other sources existed.

“When I started writing, the problem was that there was not enough information,” said Steves, noting that, at one time, guidebooks were almost the only way to decide where to stay in an unfamiliar city. As times changed, that sameness gave way to the untamed, thrilling diversity of today’s digital wilderness.

“It got to the point where there was too much information,” he said, noting that proliferating sources made it harder to know what was reliable. Researching a trip online can be a Mad Max infinity loop of unvetted user-generated reviews and self-appointed experts. Trading free trips for sunny features is common practice in the world of travel influencers, with little transparency about who is footing the bill for a given blog post or YouTube video.

While earlier travellers just needed some basic info, Steves said, guidebooks’ main value proposition might now be an escape hatch from that digital overwhelm. “Part of my job is to curate all the options – the glut of information – with a consistent set of values,” he said.

What’s more, a print guidebook offers a chance to unplug, allowing travellers to put down their phones, Steves noted. With a screen close at hand, it’s too easy to let your attention drift away from that chic Parisian bistro and into drearily quotidian scrolling.

It seems to be working out, because Steves’s 2019 royalty checks were the highest of his career. Despite apocalyptic warnings, in fact, guidebooks are generally doing okay. After the rocky industry news of 2013, travel book sales stabilised, then stayed roughly even until the pandemic hit.

Most travellers who still buy print books, though, now seem to read them in conjunction with, not instead of, online resources. In recent Facebook and Twitter posts, veteran traveller and content creator Abigail King queried followers about how they use guidebooks today, noticing some buy for pre-trip research, reverting to the Internet for facts on the ground.

Others turn books into a kind of souvenir stuffed with ticket stubs and handwritten notes.

“I use them in a really different way now, too, mainly for reading about the country and planning an itinerary,” said King, who lives in the United Kingdom. She noted that, when travelling to destinations in Europe with consistent cell coverage, she’s unlikely to bring a hard copy along.

“Guidebooks are now among a suite of tools people use,” said Grace Fujimoto, acquisitions director at Avalon Travel, which oversees the Moon Travel Guides imprint that is the United States’ top guidebook seller. (Disclosure: I’ve written several Moon guidebooks.) Fujimoto said the pandemic accelerated that shift toward book-plus-digital, partly because information has changed so quickly in the past two years.

But it just underscores a broader trend of recent years, she said. “Guidebooks are becoming more and more inspirational, in addition to just being repositories of information,” Fujimoto said, offering a forthcoming guidebook to Spain’s Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail as an example. “It does have a lot of good practical information, but it combines it with ways of appreciating what you’re seeing and doing almost every step of the way,” she said.

Lonely Planet is another publisher leaning into the shift. “Guidebooks are evolving into this experiential, curated collection,” said Lonely Planet spokesman Chris Zeiher. This month, the company released a new line of photo-heavy “Experience” guides, which Zeiher said are designed to inspire.

The first titles in the series, guidebooks to Italy, Portugal, Japan, Ireland, Scotland and Iceland, are noticeably lacking in the old-style comprehensive listings of hotels and restaurants. In their place are expert interviews and short, magazine-style features on the kinds of experiences travellers might build a trip around.

Flip through these to get fired up for chasing waterfalls in Iceland, for instance, or to dream up an itinerary focused on visiting Japanese temples. And unlike the earliest Lonely Planet guides, which were oriented to longer, more comprehensive trips, these are tailored to the shorter vacations increasingly common among travellers from the United States.

Zeiher, too, heard predictions of print guidebooks’ demise since he joined Lonely Planet nearly 17 years ago. But he’s optimistic about the coming decade. “One thing that Lonely Planet’s always done, is we’ve always evolved,” he said. “I think we’ll continue to do that.”

As the pandemic recedes and travellers return to the world, he’s betting there’s room in their bags for a book.

Danielle Braff

CNA/THE NEW YORK TIMES – About a year into the pandemic, Marcela Rafea began waking up consistently at 3am, her mind racing.

She would creep out of bed and tiptoe into the living room, where she would meditate, try a few yoga poses and open the window to hear the leaves rustle, the cars rush by and the dogs bark.

Then, at 6am, she crawled back into bed and would sleep again until her youngest child woke her for the day at 7am.

“I needed that night wakefulness to make up for the time that I didn’t have for myself,” said Rafea, a 50-year-old photographer and mother of three who lives in Oak Park, Illinois.

Unbeknown to Rafea, she had naturally reverted back to a sleep cycle that was believed to be standard in multiple cultures in the late Middle Ages through the early 19th Century.

During that time, many people went to sleep around sundown and woke three to four hours later. They socialised, read books, had small meals and tried to conceive children before going back for a second sleep for another three to four hours.

It was only when artificial light was introduced that people began forcing themselves to sleep through the night, said professor of history at Virginia Tech and the author of The Great Sleep Transformation A Roger Ekirch.

Now that many people are making their own schedules, working from home and focussing more on self-care, there has been a return for some to the idea of a segmented sleep cycle – voluntary and, given the stress levels of the past two years, not.

So are we simply reverting to our long forgotten, natural sleep cycle? And could this be the cure for those deemed middle-of-the-night insomniacs?

WHAT IS SEGMENTED SLEEP?
Ekirch, who has studied segmented sleep for the past 35 years, said there are more than 2,000 references to it from literary sources: everything from letters to diaries to court records to newspapers, plays, novels and poetry, from Homer to Chaucer to Dickens.

“The phenomenon went by different names in different places: first and second sleep, first nap and dead sleep, evening sleep and morning sleep,” said professor of English at Emory University and the author of Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World Benjamin Reiss.

He added that rather than being a choice at the time, this was simply something that people did, as it fit agricultural and artisanal patterns of labour.

Back then, in addition to being a useful time for conceiving, the wakeful period was also believed to be a prime time for taking potions and pills and for aiding digestion (one would sleep on one side of the body during the first sleep, and then on the other side during the second sleep), Ekirch said.

There was no pressure to get to the factory floor on time, to catch a train or to send children off to school, as most work was done in or near the home, Reiss said. Sleep wasn’t governed by the clock, but by the rhythms of night and day as well as by changes in the season.

THE DOWNSIDE OF SEGMENTED SLEEP
There were negative reasons for segmented sleep as well.

“Sleeping surfaces – often a sack stuffed with grass, or if you were lucky, wool or horsehair – made it harder than it is today to sleep for a long stretch without interruption,” Reiss said.

And there were, of course, health issues. For example, “without modern dentistry, a toothache might start throbbing in the middle of the night”.

Everything changed with the Industrial Revolution, emphasising profit and productivity; the belief was that people who confined their sleep to a single interval gained an advantage. The growing prevalence of artificial lights permitted later bedtimes, leading to sleep compression.

Fast forward a few hundred years, and we’ve grown accustomed to compressed sleep. Well, some of us have.

Thirty per cent of people report waking up at least three nights per week, according to one study published in 2010 in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, and 25 per cent of adults suffer from insomnia each year, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

For some people, the pandemic has spurred more flexible schedules, which has led to experiments with the old-fashioned sleep method.

AN EFFECT OF THE PANDEMIC
That’s the case for Mark Hadley, a 52-year-old finance manager in North Bend, Oregon. In the past 20 years, Hadley said he doesn’t remember a time when he slept completely through the night.

“I always woke up halfway through the night and just lay there,” he said. “Physically, I wanted to get up, but I needed more sleep.”

Hadley didn’t have a choice. He had heard of segmented sleep, but didn’t have time to stretch his own… until his job went mainly remote during the pandemic.

So in August 2021, Hadley started segmented sleeping, going to bed at 10pm and waking up naturally at 2am. He gets up for one and a half to two hours to read and to pray. Then he goes back to bed around 3.30-4am and sleeps until his wife wakes him at 6.30-7am.

“This is what my body was trying to do, even when I had never heard of it,” Hadley said. “I finally got to a place where I have a healthy sleep pattern.”

Doctors are conflicted about how healthy segmented sleep is, however.

“We don’t really know the long-term impacts of segmented sleep because we don’t really have much data on it,” said an associate professor of psychology in clinical neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Matthew Ebben.

It may make some people feel more fatigued and drowsy throughout the day, said health psychologist and assistant professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine Nicole Avena. Also, Avena said, segmented sleep requires individuals to go to bed earlier, which may not work with many schedules.

That’s why Kristopher Weaver, a 43-year-old songwriter in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, said he manages to stick to a segmented sleep schedule only a few nights a week.

The days he does have time to sleep between 7-11pm and then again between 3-7am, he wakes up refreshed. During his break between first and second sleeps, when his mind is quiet and recharged, Weaver has more energy to write his songs.

The nights that he forces himself to sleep in one go? He needs caffeine and marijuana to get through the next day.

A CURE FOR INSOMNIA
For Danielle Hughes, 33, segmented sleep was a remedy to her insomnia. Hughes, who lives in Dublin, Ireland, spent an entire year visiting with doctors to try to find a solution for her middle-of-the-night awakenings. She finally Googled her issue and stumbled upon segmented sleep.

“It was like a light bulb moment for me,” Hughes said. “The whole anxiety I had about not being able to sleep started to ease, and I started to feel like what little sleep I was getting at night was okay as long as I used my wake time more productively.”

Since she found out about segmented sleep, Hughes has been more open to this concept, sleeping from 2-6am and again from 2-6pm.

In cases of anxiety around insomnia like Hughes’, segmented sleep is often an ideal solution, said sleep science coach and founder of SleepingOcean Alex Savy.

“When practising segmented sleep, insomniacs don’t have to worry about waking up in the middle of the night, as that’s the way segmented sleep works,” Savy said.