Q&A with Lonely Planet founders Tony & Maureen Wheeler

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

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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.

MW: Last year we just released our Chinese editions. The Chinese have been seeing Westerners come for years carrying Lonely Planet books. They're very well aware of the brand, and they like the brand. They associate it with long-term independent travelers who are really interested in the country. We're surprised at how well and how quickly we've moved to a market presence there in Chinese.

CT: Are there any countries where you've had trouble with your books?

TW: Vietnam. We've had enormous piracy problems there. They just copy off everything. [But also] there was something they took exception to in one of our books. It was something saying, in Vietnam they had the best police money could buy. And they used to tear that page out of the book. But then the pirated edition that was on sale in Vietnam had that page in it. So what good that did them, I have no idea at all.

CT: Back in the early 1990s in a story in the Tribune, you talked about traveling with your children, who weren't yet in their teens. What kind of travelers did they become?

MW: The interesting thing is that our daughter from a very early age loved travel. Absolutely loved it. You can tell from when she was 6 months old that being in different hotel rooms and meeting different people and being picked up and carried around by various people in restaurants that we met, that she was happy about that. Whereas our son, from 3 months old, hated the idea that he was in a different room every night and there were all those strangers around him. He's mellowed out a bit as he got older, but Tashi [now 26] still loves to travel and will go anywhere at the drop of a hat. Whereas Kieran [now 24] -- I think every three or four years he finally gets a bit of a bug to go traveling somewhere but it has to be somewhere that he's been before, and it has to be somewhere he's comfortable with.

TW: Which includes India, of course.

MW: So it's not as if he just goes and sits on a beach on Australia. He does try to go a little bit further afield, but it has to be somewhere he's comfortable.

CT: You've seen so much of the world, but where haven't you been that you want to go?

MW: People always assume that we've been everywhere, and we have been to a great many places. But I think the nice thing about traveling is the world actually gets bigger not smaller, because the more you travel you discover there are more places to see.

We're going to Mongolia in August where we've never been, and I'm excited about that. And the last couple of years we've spent more time in Africa, which has been fabulous because it's one of those areas that you always mean to go to but somehow always put off.

And then, of course, they keep creating new countries. Not that long ago it was just Russia or the Soviet Union, and now, of course, it's splintered into about 23, 27 countries that we now have to go to.

TW: There's an organization called The Traveler's Century Club and to be a member you have to claim -- nobody checks up, but you have to be able to claim -- that you've been to 100 countries. Now they extend the list of countries in the world quite a bit. I think there are about 192 countries in the U.N., and there are a number of others which are either like Taiwan [that] really should be viewed as a country or there are colonies or places like Antarctica, which is not a country but a continent.

We feel there are about 230 countries in the world, and I have to shame-facedly admit that I do keep track of how many of them I've been to. At last count I'd been to 132 or 134, so I still have more than 100 or so to go, which I'll never get finished with all them. And you, Maureen, do you ever count them up?

MW: No, I hate that whole idea. It becomes like a consumer list; you tick the boxes. Also the moment someone says to you, "How many countries have you been to?" you know very well that they're going to say, "Well, I've been to more." So I hate to do that. I just say, "No, I don't have any clue." But I guess if Tony's been to 132, I've been to six, seven, eight less.

TW: Maybe [laughter].

MW: What, you reckon it's more?

TW: More or less, yeah [laughter].

CT: What's your view of the United States as a tourism destination -- and how we deal with foreign tourists?

TW: We've been visitors of the states for a long time. I actually lived in the states when I was a kid for about six, seven years -- my father was working here. And then Maureen and I and our children moved to San Francisco in the mid '80s when we opened the first Lonely Planet office. There was probably a good 10 years or more where we were coming over here at least three times a year. In recent years, we haven't come quite so much. It's been a variety of business reasons apart from anything else.

There's no question that a lot of people are viewing the U.S. as a more difficult destination. There is a lot of concern amongst people who are involved in U.S. tourism that it's not keeping up with the general increase in worldwide tourism.

And there's an awful lot of talk about the United States at the moment. One of the things we're all very aware of these days is who's running for election. That's always been the case to some extent overseas. The U.S. is the elephant, and when it sneezes we all may catch a cold.

There is a huge amount of interest in the U.S., and it's disappointing that perhaps there aren't more people coming here and seeing the U.S. from within as well as just viewing it from without. Because when you go to a country you almost always come out with a more favorable impression of it than you had before.

CT: What advice do you give new travelers?

MW: When we did our very first book, "Across Asia on the Cheap," we did a small introduction on the front page. We said the hardest thing about traveling is making the decision to go, but just go. I think the decision to travel is the hardest one to make. Not even where you're going to travel, but to actually travel. To leave behind your comfort zone and everything you know. Europe can be quite an unknown destination for people that have never traveled before. So I do think that really the decision is just to go to be excited enough, or curious enough, or interested enough in the world outside what you know to make that decision to leave and to go and to see what it's all about.

So where do you go? I think you have to make the decision based on the places that really appeal to you. The things that tug at your heartstrings or else the things that tug at your intellectual strings. What am I interested in, what places appeal to me, what is exciting about this.?And then I think, y'know, you go.

CT: What changes have you seen in travel over the years?

TW: In many ways travel has become a lot easier. There's so much technology, which makes it easier if you want to communicate from home; Internet cafes are there, and you can be in instant touch. Too much instant touch sometimes.

MW: Credit cards.

TW: ATM machines are everywhere. I'd almost like to keep a list of the strange places in the world where I've got money from. Also, English is so much more widely spoken. OK, it's sort of sinful that we do get along on English so much and not try learning other languages, but it's out there and it's easy to use.

CT: How has Lonely Planet changed?

TW: People sometimes think of Lonely Planet as a backpacker's guidebook publisher, and I guess that really emanates from the fact that, when we started, Maureen and I were both in our 20s and we had no money so we were doing trips for people who were also in their 20s with no money. And, of course, the company has grown enormously since then. And we do books for all sorts of people. I always seem to be talking about the more adventurous, more off-the-beaten-track, more on-the-edge sort of places. But equally, we like traveling civilized places as well. We went to Paris two weekends ago. Went to an opera, went to a brand-new museum. Had some very nice food and some very nice wine. Civilized travel is fine by us as well.

CT: Where do you live now -- and where are you from?

MW: We live in Melbourne, Australia. We arrived in Australia on our first trip and spent a year in Sydney, and then we went off and traveled around Southeast Asia, and at the end of that trip we had to decide whether to go back to England or go back to Australia. And we virtually tossed a coin and it came down Australia, and because we lived in Sydney, we decided to go to Melbourne, and I don't know how it happened but we've been stuck there every since.

Originally I'm from Ireland.

TW: I was originally from England, but because my father was working overseas, I didn't really live in England until I was 16.

We don't play that [Lonely Planet is Australian] up too much. Australians are great travelers, and an awful lot of them have passports. But a lot of people have no idea where we're from. Even Australians are surprised some times to discover that we're an Australian business.

CT: [To Maureen] Do you go "home" to Ireland very often?

MW: I try to go back every year. My family is there, and I've got some very good friends there. And I have to admit I just love Ireland. Somehow the place you grew up, I think, is the place you just naturally feel very comfortable in. You may not always want to live there. You may find it exasperating in some ways, but somehow it's like slipping into an old pair of slippers. It's comfortable and it's nice, and I find for myself that it's important to know that I can go back. Even though it's also important to know that I can leave.

TW: And you're going back in two weeks time and taking a group of friends.

CT: Americans sometimes have problems with English spoken by non-Americans. What's been your experience?

MW: I was [in America] with a girlfriend, an American girl, and we went to buy some food from the deli. I said, "I'll have some pastrami, some ham," and the guy just went, "Wat?" like I don't know what she said. And my girlfriend went, "Listen, jerk, she's speaking English!" So I was like 'Oh, OK.' And it wasn't that I was saying pas-trahmi, but I wasn't saying pas-tromi, but he closed off. He decided he didn't understand me. That was it. That happens in lots of places. In Australia, Australians always think I'm an American.

TW: There was a lovely little clip someone sent me once. It was a spoof thing. Supposedly a CNN crew interviewing someone in Iraq, subtitling this guy who spoke perfectly good English.

MW: But he has the cloth on and he's supposedly an insurgent.

TW: And he realizes that subtitles are coming up and he gets absolutely furious. "I went to the American University in Cairo; you can understand me perfectly well."

MW: And then the other insurgent starts to speak, and he says, "He hasn't got subtitles, why has he not got subtitles?" And then the interviewer [speaks], and he says, "You haven't got subtitles! Oh, you're so good, you haven't got subtitles." And everyone begins to turn and walk away. It's very funny.

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