You all know I’m in New Zealand right now. And if you don’t know it yet, well….all you need to know is this: I’m in New Zealand.

In this country, there is so much to do and explore, that I decided I have to buy a travel guide. You say: “What? You don’t have a travel guide yet?”. Well, I have… sort of. I have a travel guide in ebook, for my kindle, and it’s awesome, but at the same time I need some physical book for a better and faster consultation.

I generally buy Lonely Planet guides, but I’m open to suggestions. When I was looking for Lonely Planet guide to New Zealand, I decided to have a look at the New Zealand travel guide by Rough Guides. I was listening to Queens Of The Stone Age’s “Era Vulgaris” and reading Monocle, when I took my Samsung Galaxy S2 to have a look at those guides.

Rough Guides website gave me a nice experience. Here is what I found:

It’s weird because I said to myself: “OH, a good website optimized for mobile”. It’s weird because I should always find good and well optimized sites when looking up stuff on mobile.

The Rough Guides website is well optimized, for sure the part I had a chance to explore. I’m happy…because the site is good, effective and helpful.

Here is what I found when looking at Lonely Planet website:

YES! Two sites out of two optimized for mobile. GREAT!!!!

I was excited to write “New Zealand” in the search box. And here is what Lonely Planet is showing to me:

Wait. WHAT? No optimized site here?

So what Lonely Planet is saying to me is: I’m showing you a well optimized homepage so to say I’m cool, but then I’m giving a crap experience to you, mobile user, for the rest of the site.

You see? Digital marketers and CEOs and all those three-letter acronyms are focused too much and too often in stuff that doesn NOT matter. Only numbers, numbers, numbers, while treating their users in a bad way.

How is it possible that a travel guide website is not optimized for mobile? You see the word there? TRAVEL. People who travel look up for things on mobile, but I’m sure it’s not me who has to tell you this.

You are lazy, you don’t fight for your users, you don’t even look at your website since years. Because you are too focused on organizing meetings.

What is making the difference? Passion. But if you don’t have it anymore, at least take a look at your website on your mobile once in a while travelling, and you should realize it’s not possible to have a site like the Lonely Planet one in 2014.