The journalist used the term "Geoffness", in tribute to Crowther,[clarification needed] to describe a quality that has been lost in travel guides.

Lonely Planet's digital presence included 140 apps and 8.5 million unique users for lonelyplanet.com, which hosted the Thorn Tree travel forum.

[21] In 2024, Lonely Planet announced that it withdrew from the market in China and ceased publishing travel guides in simplified Chinese.

In April 2020, the forum was locked and left in read-only mode as part of Lonely Planet temporarily halting business in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[30] In 2009, the NLD formally dropped its previous stance and now welcomes visitors "who are keen to promote the welfare of the common people".

In 2010, for instance, Lonely Planet was blamed[clarification needed] for the rise of what is sometimes referred to as 'the Banana Pancake Trail' in Southeast Asia.

[31][32] In March 2019, Lonely Planet posted a video on Facebook falsely claiming that the Banaue Rice Terraces in the Philippines were created by the Chinese, leading to criticism.

In a follow-up interview, he first claimed that in one case he had not even visited the country he wrote about, but subsequent to the ensuing publicity boost for his new book, Kohnstamm clarified that, in this particular edition, he was only contracted to update the five-page history section.

[35] After a review of Kohnstamm's guidebooks, Lonely Planet's then-publisher Piers Pickard stated that he had "failed to find any inaccuracies" in them.