Q&A with Lonely Planet founders Tony & Maureen Wheeler

Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times Travel Editors
01:43 AM PDT, August 28, 2007

Related Stories

Editor's note: Lonely Planet announced Oct. 1, 2007, that the Wheelers are selling their majority stake in the company they founded 34 years ago to BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The Wheelers will retain a 25% share of the company. See our Travel blog for details.

The Chicago Tribune recently visited with Tony and Maureen Wheeler, a couple of backpackers from Australia who turned their love for undiscovered places into the Lonely Planet guidebook empire. They were in Chicago to promote Tony's new book, "Tony Wheeler's Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil," which took him to nine countries you won't be visiting on a Funjet or Apple vacation.

Chicago Tribune: A one-word question on your new book, "Why?"

Tony Wheeler: "Bad Lands" was inspired by Mr. Bush. When he said there was an axis of evil with three countries on it, my first thought was, "Well, I've got to go there!" So "Bad Lands" started off with the axis of evil trio -- North Korea, Iran and Iraq. Then I added other countries, which, for various reasons, various governments have defined as bad. I put in Afghanistan, home of the Taliban. I put in Libya, home of Mr. Gadhafi. Burma, where many people say you shouldn't go there because of the military dictatorship putting Aung San Suu Kyi under arrest for seven years. Cuba, where despite 50 years of clamoring for regime change, [Castro's] still there, still in power, still alive as we speak. I put in Albania almost by accident. It was a sad little country that was cut off from not just Europe but from the whole outside world for 40-plus years by its somewhat crazy communist dictator, Enver Hoxha. What else does that leave? Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers from 9/11 came from.

There's no way I'm encouraging people to go and take their next vacation in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But I think quite a few of the other countries would be very interesting for people to visit. Cuba, of course, gets lots and lots of tourists. Libya is trying to get more tourism today. Albania would love to have tourists. People have almost forgotten that it exists. They don't realize that the problems the country had for so many years are really over.

But if there was one country I found was a real surprise it would be Iran. Iran was such a friendly and outgoing country. I was astonished how often the Persian carpet was sort of unrolled, and you were made welcome in so many places.

CT: Did you have any problems?

TW: The remarkable thing about traveling to these countries -- countries where if you look at State Department advisories you're told, "Don't go there!" -- is that I really had no trouble at all. Even Iraq, the northern region of Iraq -- the Kurdistan region -- is pretty much OK. There have been some problems just recently, but in general, for the last two or three years, there have been very little problems in Kurdistan.

Afghanistan -- obviously the south of Afghanistan is very unsafe. There are lots of areas of Afghanistan that are very unsafe. But the only trouble I saw the whole time I was there was in Kabul. There's random violence in Kabul, but most of the time it's all right. And most of the rest of the country up north is fairly OK.

CT: In any of these countries, did you run into any Americans trying to pass themselves off as Canadians for safety reasons?

TW: People in many places of the world wish they were some other nationality. I often think if you had to choose your nationality, Irish would be a really good one to be because nobody seems to take offense against the Irish. They don't seem to have really offended anybody in the wider world.

On the other hand, Americans sometimes do have problems. We've had these stories of Americans masquerading as Canadians, which the Canadians take great offense to, of course. But the interesting thing was, I did meet Americans in Iran in particular, and I met a number of Americans, and the first thing I asked them was, well, everyone is treating me very well as an Australian, how are you being treated? And all of them were being treated with respect, and courtesy, and also real interest because they know the reaction that Iran is causing in the states these days and they really want to hear from someone directly, "Well, what is the opinion of Iraq?"

CT: Could you tell us a little about Lonely Planet's history?

MW: Lonely Planet started in 1973 after Tony and I had decided to take a year out and travel around the world. We left London and bought an old car and drove to Afghanistan where we sold the car. And then we came on by bus and by train to Australia.

And we arrived in Australia, and the whole purpose of this trip was to try and get travel out of our system. But unfortunately by the time we arrived in Australia, travel was absolutely in our system and we had no intention of stopping. So we decided to stay in Australia for a year and earn enough money to travel around the world for another two years.

During the time we were there, people would ask us, "How did you sell your car in Afghanistan?" "How did you get through India?" "Did you get sick?" And we ended up putting a little book together, which became the first Lonely Planet book.

We've been traveling now for about 34 years as Lonely Planet, and we have 600 titles, 460 of which are country guides and phrase books and all the travel guides. And we sell about 7 million books a year, so it's not such a lonely planet.

CT: There's an interesting story about the name.

TW: We were finishing off our very first book in Sydney, thinking, "What are we going to call this little publishing house we're about to create?" We had just been to see a movie called "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." It was Joe Cocker traveling around the states in the late '60s, I guess. And one of the songs in the film had a line about traveling across the sky and seeing a lonely planet. And I thought that sounded nice, but Maureen corrected me, that it didn't say "lonely planet" at all, he was actually singing "lovely planet." So in a way, the name has been a mistake.

CT: Lonely Planet has also developed a prominent position on the Web.

MW: We started our first Web site in 1994, and that was because we could see there were real possibilities for people to get information really quickly on the Web in a way that you can't in a book. With a book, by the time that you've researched it and printed it and shipped it, the information is getting old -- and there really isn't anything you can do about that process. Our Thorn Tree, which is our chat room on the Web, is fantastic because you get real information really quickly. You can go on and ask about virtually anything, any place in the world, and you might even get someone who's there right now -- whether it's Colombia or Libya -- in an Internet cafe who can come back and give you information that you want.

We've been investing a lot in the Web, [but] I can't bear the thought that one day there won't be books. Or that they'd be on a BlackBerry. I mean you can't go to bed with a BlackBerry. But I can see a time where there's young people who very well might.

I think there are some real uses for all of this, because this is information. The ways you can get it to people. For example, there may be one day you're crossing the border between Pakistan and India, and you want to know, "What is the currency rate here?" "What am I going to get for my American dollars when I turn up at the border?" And you'll just do something on your BlackBerry which will send a message straight to Thorn Tree, and you'll come back, y'know, "Ask for Monty; he's on the third booth on the right, and he has the best rate."

Those sorts of things I think are coming, and we're doing our very best to be there when they do.

TW: Our guidebooks are very international. I think one of the advantages we had at the very start, being an Australian publisher, is we had to look out. Australia, there's only 20 million people. It's such a small place that we had to publish internationally. So we looked to the English language market in Britain and Europe, and the American market and Canada and New Zealand

Our books are translated into a lot of different languages, and generally they're very much the same, but there are subtle differences. Some things you just can't translate. There are movies that are available in one language that just don't appear in another language. So you put them in one book but not another. And it's amusing things, like the French really do need more restaurants.

We have a huge market presence in one country in Europe -- Italy. It's not because the Italians are great travelers; they're not as big travelers as the Germans or the French. But there isn't as much competition. And as a result we are sort of overwhelmingly No. 1 in Italy. We almost have a bigger market presence in Italy than we do in our home country, Australia, or in the states, or in the UK.

Single page | 1 2 3 >>