Born over beers in the Baltics
In Your Pocket was born over several beers in the Stikliai beer hall in Vilnius, Lithuania, during a long December evening in 1991. German Matthias Lüfkens and Belgian brothers George, Oliver and Nicolas Ortiz, finding themselves in a city that at the time had no telephone directory, decided that what it needed was a practical, honest guide written by people who actually lived there. The four set out to conquer the world armed with a dream and a laptop. They've still got the dreams, and perhaps also the laptop (in a dusty box somewhere or other).
Three decades later, In Your Pocket has grown into one of Europe's leading providers of urban travel information, with locally produced guides covering cities across the continent and beyond, available both at inyourpocket.com and in print. Our lively, opinionated style has earned praise from, among others, Le Monde, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, the Sunday Times, the BBC, Rough Guides and Lonely Planet, which is a fairly good return on that original investment in Stikliai's beer.
Death of physical guidebooks have been greatly exaggerated
The travel media industry has changed considerably since 1991, and we have changed with it, though not always without some grumbling along the way. The rise of search engines, social media and, most recently, AI has reshaped how people find travel information in ways that present genuine challenges for independent publishers. We are not going to pretend otherwise. What we will say is that the death of the physical guidebook has been rather overstated.
Travellers, it turns out, still like to have something in their hands: a map they can fold, a guide they can stuff in a jacket pocket, a recommendation from someone who actually knows the place rather than an algorithm that has been trained to sound like it does. Our local offices across Europe have seen their printed products thrive in recent years, and we take that as a meaningful signal rather than a nostalgia trip.
New and much improved inyourpocket.com
On the digital side, we are in the middle of something of a reinvention. A completely new version of inyourpocket.com is currently being rolled out, built around a clean, minimalistic design with something of a retro nod to our roots. It is fast, easy to navigate and built from the ground up with phones in mind, because that is where most of you are reading this. It is also, if we are being honest, a work in progress, and will continue to be improved in the months and quite possibly years ahead. The aim is simple: to make sure that the quality local content we have always produced actually gets seen by the people it was written for.
Which brings us back to Vilnius in those heady days of the early ‘90s. The world has changed enormously since Matthias, George, Oliver and Nicolas sat down with their beers and their laptop and decided that travellers deserved better than they were getting. The tools are different, the platforms are different, and the challenges are different. The aim is exactly the same.
