The Road Less Traveled - Story of Tony Wheeler's 'Lonely Planet'

With Tony Wheeler of Lonely Planet

When Tony Wheeler arrived in Sydney with just 27 cents to his name back in 1972, it seemed an unlikely launching pad for one of the world’s best-loved brands.

Tony Wheeler: Lonely Planet, lovely socks

“We were always the company who went out to the most weird and wonderful places. That definitely helped us in those early days”
-Tony Wheeler, Founder of Lonely Planet

The New York Daily News once referred to Tony and Maureen Wheeler as “specialists in guiding weird folks to weird places.” It’s testament to the success of their Lonely Planet guidebooks that such a description now seems anachronistic. Thanks to their relentless spirit of adventure and 30 years of travel publishing, they’ve inspired generations of weirdos (and plenty of not-so-weirdos) to widen their horizons, making the world a much smaller place in the process. “Even at the very beginning, there was a feeling that people liked what we were doing,” explains Wheeler. “We had this sense right from the very first book that there was a demand for it.”

Establishing a reputation for boldly going where few have gone before, Lonely Planet started out as an adventure. In the early 1970s, Wheeler – along with his wife Maureen – set out on a year-long trip around the world, with the intention of getting the travel bug out of their systems. Their route took them from London across Europe, through the Middle East and across Asia, following the old ‘hippie trail’ down to Australia.

On arrival in Sydney and with only a few cents between them, the Wheelers decided to self-publish their account of the trip, initially in order to fund their airfare home. The quirky guide, Across Asia on the Cheap, soon sold out and was quickly followed by what became the backpackers’ bible, South-East Asia on a Shoestring. Their success led the Wheelers to abandon their plans to return home in favor of further travel and more writing; venturing off the well-trodden paths of the established travel books, the guides catered to a new generation of independent, budget-conscious travelers long before the advent of mass tourism.

Wheeler modestly claims that they were the beneficiaries of a cultural shift. “It was definitely the right time to do it,” he says. “People’s travel horizons were getting wider, and the baby boomers were starting to travel more. They were going further than previous generations had done. The jumbo jets were coming in, so the price of travel was going down, and it was the right time to jump on a trend. I guess we just didn’t appreciate what a big trend we were jumping onto.”

His honesty typifies the laid back approach to the business taken by the couple in the early days. “We weren’t very business-minded about it,” he admits. “We never sat down and thought, ‘There’s Project A, and there’s Project B, and Project B would be more profitable.’ If Project A was more interesting, we always did that instead.” If anything, Wheeler believes that this actually contributed to the burgeoning reputation of the fledgling enterprise. “We were always the company who went out to the most weird and wonderful places. That definitely helped us in those early days.”

He insists those early days were extremely hard work, despite the fact that he was living out his dream job. “In the very early days we did everything,” he says. “We had to learn the business from the ground up, every element of it, and our main problem was the same as it is for a lot of small businesses: survival. In essence we faced the same things that anybody developing a small business faces – finding the right people, having enough money to keep going, scaling up. You have sleepless nights, and you lose some hair thinking about it.”

The key was just getting the books out in the marketplace; not only did the husband and wife team research and write the books themselves, provide the photographs, draw the maps and prepare the documents for print, they also liaised with the printers, pitched the bookshops and hustled the distributors to negotiate the best deals. Wheeler recalls traipsing around Australia and New Zealand with a bag full of guides that he used to sell direct to the booksellers. “It was pretty backbreaking work, at first,” he laughs. “It took about three or four years before it was really off and running. It wasn’t like the dotcom boom, where businesses would start on day one with nothing and then by day two had grown to $100 million turnover. It was a long climb – and it wasn’t even steady, it was pretty up and down.”

Slowly, the business grew. And as international travel became more popular, so too did Lonely Planet. Despite its organic growth path, Wheeler can still pinpoint the moment when he realized he and Maureen had a success on their hands.  “A big part of it was just seeing the books out there – going to different places and seeing the books on the shelves, in bookshops, and seeing people using them,” he says. “This one time, I was in India and noticed the locals using our India book. I remember thinking, wow, when even the local population uses your books, that a sign things are working well. That book was a landmark for us. It was bigger, better, more expensive and sold better than anything we’d done before, and it helped us take a step up to a larger size.”

Since then, the business has gone from strength to strength. The company now publishes over 500 titles in eight languages with annual sales of more than six million books, and has been so successful that the Wheelers recently sold a 75 percent stake in the business to BBC Worldwide for an undisclosed (but significant) sum. “It was time for a change, and a deal with the BBC just seemed as close to perfection as we could ask for,” he says. “They are a company with a very good reputation and existing capabilities that played to our strengths, and we were able to offer them some things that they didn’t have. So it was a good combination.”

Like most start-ups, the Lonely Planet story is one of developments, experiments, trial and error – a process Wheeler maintains has been good for both him and the company as a whole. “I think if you start small, and you learn from the ground up, you do have more of a feel for it,” he explains. “I love the fact that Bill Gates still likes to write computer code. He started that business because he was a computer nerd, and in some respects he still is. And you know, that’s a good thing. I’d be disappointed if we had people running Lonely Planet who weren’t enthusiastic travelers; anybody coming for a job here has to love travel. You can’t be a good editor of guidebooks if you haven’t been anywhere.”

For Wheeler, this is the most important part of running a business – making sure you do something you enjoy. “If you’re doing what you love doing, it communicates itself to your customers and the other people you’re working with,” he says with a smile. “And even if you’re not making money, you’re having a good time.”

Extra info…

Postcards from the edge
What is your favorite hotel? I rarely stay in hotels twice, and that’s just sort of a guidebook thing. Once you’ve been to a place, you want to try something different next time you go back there. I tend to go back to different places, if I can.

Do you have a favorite destination? If there’s a place I’ve been back to most often it’s probably Nepal, because I like walking. Most of all, I live for variety – I like being in modern, civilized cities; and on the other hand, I like traveling to the weird and wonderful places in the back of beyond.

What is the most awe-inspiring place you’ve been to? Probably Antarctica. It’s the drama of the place. Everything is either black or white or blue. It doesn’t have the full palette of colors we see elsewhere in the world. Antarctica has always struck me as a very dramatic place.
Where would you most like to revisit? Probably somewhere in Europe. I think Europe does sort of pull you back. Places like Italy – the history, the architecture, the food and the style of life – it all appeals.

Is there anywhere still on the to-do list? There’re still far too many places on my to-do list. I’ve never been up over the Karakorum Highway, the road that runs up over the Himalayas from Pakistan to China. There are lots of places in China I’ve never been to. And I’ve never been to Alaska. There is still a lot to see.