Tech and travel: new apps abound, but don't write off guidebooks just yet.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: TRAVEL & TOURISM

THE TRUSTY TRAVEL GUIDE--the paper variety--is at a crossroads.

Take the case of Google buying Frommer's Travel Guides in 2012. The search giant immediately quashed the model of regularly updated paper books, but within a year sold off the longstanding brand back to its namesake founder, Arthur Frommer, who started writing travel guides in the 1950s.

The paper guide was back--but the Frommer's catalog was sliced from about 300 titles to 20 when it resumed publication in 2013.

Where dead-tree guidebooks are waning, mobile travel apps are proliferating, offering users an endless stream of hotel reviews, itineraries and other travel content.

The question is whether they can improve on the printed page.

"There have been dozens of travel-inspiration apps that have been funded and launched," says Tom Filippini, CEO of Denver-based NextGreatTrip, a charter travel provider. "It's been very difficult for them to get much traction and for people to commit to another platform."

Filippini says he's a longtime devotee of Lonely Planet's print guidebooks. "I use paper as my primary [source of information] and digital as a backup. You can underline. You can write in the margins."

Most importantly, "It's all about the content curators," Filippini says. Crowdsourced travel sites are tricky because "you have no idea whose advice to trust."

When it comes to destination marketing, technology offers a different set of challenges. Justin Bresler, director of marketing for Visit Denver, says the bureau released a smartphone app in 2010 and an iPad app in 2012, but now is focused on a responsive website that ports to phones, tablets and desktops.

"Apps are great if they're for frequent usage," he says, but that's not necessarily the case during travel planning. "People are switching screens throughout the planning process. That's a big part of why we designed the site like we did, so the same great content we have on our desktop site is also on mobile. Over the last four years, smartphones are much more pervasive. More people have smartphones and are using them."

Bresler says improvements in mobile search and smartphone-friendly websites have catalyzed Visit Denver's strategy, and that a full third of digital traffic is mobile--a notable increase.

He adds that internal content creation is not going to replace Visit Denver's traditional advertising anytime soon. "We don't look at them as either-or." He says that paid advertising still represents the lion's share of...