Print-On-Demand Guides, Magazines, & Books for Travel & Tourism Organizations

Print-On-Demand Guides, Magazines, & Books for Travel & Tourism Organizations

Publishing 7 min read

If you're in the travel industry—whether you represent a tourism board, a travel agency, or a local creator—you know how much content gets created. Travel publications are crucial for discovery, revenue, and marketing materials. From comprehensive destination guides to enticing travel booklets, delivering high-quality print materials is an important tool for attracting and supporting tourists. 

However, creating these essential materials is a considerable amount of work. Writing, page layout, and getting high-quality images is just the beginning. Then you still have to find a printer, get the book published, and ensure the books meet your expectations. Even more, you’ve got to have methods for distributing the books, whether that’s selling online or simply delivering to clients.

If you've gone through that process with a traditional bulk printer, you know how frustrating it can be. They lack customization options and require large orders. If you or the travel organization you work for needs reliable and affordable printing, massive bulk orders from an overseas printer are not it.


Challenges in Publishing 

The three biggest printing and publishing challenges  we've discovered from talking to travel creators, marketers, and tourism boards are:

  • Limited Design Flexibility - The lack of customizations, coupled with minimum orders, means you might be using outdated books. 
  • High Costs of Bulk Orders - Traditional offset printing requires large orders, often leaving you with extra materials. 
  • Complex Distribution - Storing and managing the distribution of your books is time-consuming and expensive.

Tourism boards and travel agencies rely on published content to inform creators and travelers, ideally driving them to visit the region. The regional guidebook your travel organization puts out could easily be the difference between a rush of travelers and a tumbleweed-strewn ghost town.

That means you need to ensure your books, guides, magazines, and reports are printed and bound using high-quality materials. The quality of your materials is the first thing travel creators and tourists will use to decide if traveling to your city, state, or region is the right move.

The publishing process needs to be easy, too—creating your content is likely only a part of your job. With a streamlined process, you'll have more time to work on digital marketing efforts, develop new strategies, and build new partnerships.

Using print-on-demand makes it incredibly easy to make seasonal calendars or photo books. Creating and maintaining event-specific books, local dining guides, and accessibility programs can be done by simply updating your source file.  

Growing Your Travel Creator Brand with Custom Printed Books
Learn how travel creators can grow their brand and make money by creating custom books with Lulu. A step-by-step guide to turning your content into print!

Using Print-on-Demand for Your Travel Guides & Magazines

When you don't have a surplus of books, you have the freedom to make updates more often. And when you have the option to ship directly to your clients, you save time and money on logistics. Plus, you won’t need a small warehouse and shipping solution to get your printed materials in the hands of the right people. 

Print-on-demand eliminates the need for massive print runs and storage. This flexibility gives travel creators, organizations, and tourism boards space to create fresh, accurate visitor guides and city magazines that can be updated quickly for seasonal changes, new business openings, or special events.

When you’re not tied to large print runs, new opportunities open up. A study by the Ohio Travel Association found that a staggering 95% of people who read their printed guide showed high interest or traveled to Ohio. This same study noted that 88% of people who purchase printed travel guides are looking for unique experiences like local oddities, uncommon restaurants, and scavenger hunts.

Order only what you need, when you need it. With Lulu, we print your travel books, brochures, guides, magazines, and calendars as soon as they’re ordered.

With Lulu’s print-on-demand, you can easily create, update, and distribute high-quality marketing materials and travel guides with zero inventory. 

What Types of Travel Books Can You Create with Lulu? 

Successful marketing for tourism depends on creative, diverse, and up-to-date travel content. Lulu offers all the most popular sizes for print books, including a variety of popular binding types. Here are four popular options travel creators and businesses have used Lulu to publish:

1. Travel Guides 

Perfect for generating revenue for a tourism board, travel agency, or individual creator. Guides allow you to offer unique insights into highly specific locales.

Travel guides featuring local tips, itineraries, attractions, and dining can stand out among travelers preparing for their adventure. And with Lulu's free revisions, you can easily update your guide to include new food, sites, or adventures.

2025 Deluxe Essential Hawaii Travel Planner & Visitor Guide
This visitor guide has NO third-party advertisements or paid product placements. Ad-free, beautifully designed, and perfectly curated for quick access on your trip. Our guides package the best of our website into a streamlined, ad-free, printable format for your ultimate convenience. Grab a premium copy and take advant

2. Photo Books 

Creating a beautifully printed book highlighting sites and attractions is a terrific way to capture the essence of your destination. Travelers buy photo books as memorable keepsakes of their time there.

For businesses promoting tourism, a photo book is usually more like a visual guide. It’s a glimpse into the region, a close look at what someone traveling there can expect to see or do. 

What's most important is the photo-quality printing Lulu offers. You can enjoy the best paper and inks for vibrant color images for all kinds of books, not just specifically for photo books.

I Dreamed of Fly Fishing
This book is a compilation of Andre’s favorite fly fishing memories. It is also an attempt to capture the grand spectacle of fly fishing using his artwork and photography.

3. Calendars

Calendars are always a terrific product because each year, your customers will need a new one. Creating and selling (or giving away as a promotion) regional calendars is a long-standing method for creating awareness and driving interest in regional travel. 

2025 Truck Camper Magazine Calendar
The 2025 Truck Camper Magazine Calendar features the 13 winners (and 11 Runners-Up on the back cover) of Truck Camper Magazine’s annual calendar photo contest. The photographs show hard side and pop-up truck campers in amazing settings from around the world. Here’s proof truck campers can go and camp anywhere.

4. Magazines 

Lulu offers popular magazine formats and design elements, including inside cover printing and saddle stitch binding. This format is perfect for annual, quarterly, and monthly travel magazines. 

With Lulu’s Order Import tool, you can upload our CSV with all of your subscribers’ information, and then place a single order to ship their newest edition directly to their door. 

Order Import Tool | Lulu
Place bulk import orders for your book using Lulu’s free Order Import tool. Have bulk orders printed-on-demand and drop shipped.

Flexible Sales Options

You might be used to ordering, warehousing, and fulfilling your books entirely on your end. Lulu gives you three ways to sell books that don't require any of the above.

  1. The Lulu Bookstore - Share a link to your bookstore page and allow your clients to order directly from Lulu.
  2. Lulu Direct - Connect an ecommerce service like Shopify, Wix, or WooCommerce to sell on your own site and use Lulu to fulfill those orders.
  3. Lulu Print API - Use Lulu's free API to access the global print network and connect it to any website.

You can also use Lulu for short-run orders or use our Order Import tool to send out orders for a new marketing campaign.

How to Publish & Print Travel Content with Lulu 

There are three basic steps for publishing a book for print-on-demand:

  1. Create PDF interior and PDF cover files for your publication. You can get free templates from our site to ensure you get your files built to specification for printing.
  2. Upload the files while adding details about your book, like size, binding, and paper types. This information is mostly necessary for selling on the Lulu Bookstore; if you plan to sell directly or do short-run orders, it's not required.
  3. Prepare a sales page, whether that's on the Lulu Bookstore or your own site. Or place the short-run order you need to exactly meet your client's requirements.

Modern print-on-demand has simplified all of the publishing steps, allowing anyone with prepared PDF files to upload and publish quickly. That's very important for travel agencies and tourism boards trying to stay on top of trends or product shifts.

Create and Sell Custom Travel Books with Lulu
Create and sell travel guides, journals, and photo books with Lulu’s print-on-demand platform. Perfect for bloggers, influencers, photographers, and travel businesses.

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Paul

Paul is the Senior Marketing Manager at Lulu.com. When he's not entrenched in the publishing and print-on-demand world, he likes to read, sample the fanciest craft beer, and collect fountain pens.