Building The World’s Largest Travel Guidebook Company with the Co-Founder of Lonely Planet Tony Wheeler

Jason: Welcome to the Unanchor Travel & Entrepreneurship podcast. This is Jason Demant and today I’m very excited to be joined by the co-founder of Lonely Planet, Tony Wheeler.

The Lonely Planet story begins in the early 70’s when Tony and his wife Maureen traveled across Europe and Asia for their honeymoon. They did so by any means necessary – by car, bus, train, and ferryboat and they eventually ended up in Sydney, Australia. In Sydney they wrote their first guidebook, “Across Asia on the Cheap” which was published in 1973.

Fast forward 34 years and the Wheelers built Lonely Planet into the largest travel guide book business in the world. In October 2007, Tony and his wife, Maureen sold 75% of their stake to the BBC for a reported 88.1 million pounds ($143 million dollars for the non-Brits). And in February of this year, they sold the remaining 25% to the BBC as well, ending their nearly 40-year ownership of the company.

Tony and his wife have also founded the Planet Wheeler Foundation – with a mission to support practical and effective projects which make a difference in the alleviation of poverty.

Tony, thank you very much for taking the time to join me.

Tony: Glad to be here

Jason: You’re quite the prolific traveler to say the least. Do you keep track of how many countries you’ve been to?

Tony: Yes, I am embarrassed to say I do. Maureen would be very much against it but I sort of tick the side of the box when I’ve been some place, but I’m relatively purist about it. You’ve actually got to go there. I’m not gonna say I’ve been there if I’ve just, you know, stopped in at the airport and took the next flight out.

Jason: So, what’s the cutoff? Is it 24 hours?

Tony: No, it totally depends upon where you are. So, I think that if you go to Vatican City, you haven’t got to spend overnight at the Pope’s place.

You know if you just, if you’ve been to the Vatican City, you’ve had a walk. If you’ve seen the Sistine Chapel, then you’ve been to the Vatican City. On the other hand, you know, I don’t think 24 hours in America would classify as being in America. You’ve got to do more than that to say you’ve been to the states.

Jason: Yeah. So do you mind if I ask you then, what is your country count at?

Tony: Oh, You know I’d have to look it up if you really want accurately. It’s around 150.

Then of course, you know you can have arguments about what is a country? And I’ve had these arguments and we’ve had them at Lonely Planet as well. We’ve tried doing a book on every country on Earth. Well what’s a country? You know, just being part of the UN, there are places like Taiwan which isn’t part of the UN, so you know that’s a, a thing up for discussion as well.

Jason: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. I mean in China you’ve got Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan…

Tony: Yeah, and I’d, I’d count all four of those. I’d put ticks beside all those in my boxes but of course the Chinese states-all one country.

On the other hand, they’ve all got separate currencies and different airlines, and different beers in most of them.

Jason: Yeah, it’s funny how it’s not very clear what is a country. You would expect something to be like that, something like that, clear.

Tony: Well you know, Frank Zappa actually came up with a definition. Frank Zappa said, “a beer, an airline, and a football team, and that would qualify you”.

Jason: That’s a, that’s a good definition. So what I’d like to do in this interview is go all the way back to the beginning of Lonely Planet. Talk about how you grew it and built it up, talk about finding those first customers, issues you ran into growing the business and then finally talk a little bit about what it was like selling. And then we’ll wrap up by talking about what advice you have for other entrepreneurs. Alright?

Tony: Let’s go.

Jason: So, going all the way back. What was the initial inspiration for writing that first Lonely Planet guidebook?

Tony: It was traveling and going places and realizing the information wasn’t available, and today when there’s a guidebook to just about anywhere you care to mention it seems almost impossible to think that there wasn’t that information available. But if you went back to that time, there were a lot of places where you were really struggling to find things and of course, back then you couldn’t just Google it and get sent to Wikipedia or TripAdvisor or something and find information that way. It was much more difficult to find the facts and figures and we’d traveled across Asia and had trouble at times finding out where we were gonna go and how we were going to get there and where we were going to stay and thought, there’s an opening for someone who provides that information.

Jason: Was it because you were in Asia that there was a lack of information, or do you think this industry really hadn’t been created yet?

Tony: I think, look, there was certainly information in some places and I think Asia was you know, more of a black hole in that respect. But of course Africa would have been even more so. I mean if you were traveling around France or Italy or the States or Britain or whatever, you could have found what you wanted quite easily. There are tourist offices that put out lists of camping sites and there were restaurant guides and, certainly not as thorough and complete with as choices you get today, but that information was certainly there. But Asia was certainly much more of a blank slate.

Jason: Gotcha. And how many cofounders did you have at the beginning?

Tony: Well at the beginning it was just Maureen and I. That’s all, that’s all there was to it. We were the only two people and we did the first few books ourselves. And even the first ten books we did, I’d written half of them,

It was still very much a sort of Mom and Pop, you know, kitchen table sort of operation. But I, I think with any good idea, no matter where it was at all. Nobody has it all by themselves. If the time is ripe for a good idea to work out, other people will have a similar idea. There were other people coming up with very similar things to us around that time. You know in France, there was a thing called a Guide du Routard, and you know they’re still going strong today and Philippe Gloaguen who started that, was really kicking around Asia at the same time as us.

The Rough Guides came along a few years after us. Henry Pratt, who started Pratt publications, was only a year or so after us. Moon publications, the American publishing house, which actually kicked off in Sydney as well, started more or less the same month as us.

Jason: Actually, I’m going to deviate from my plan here. Why do you think Lonely Planet stands above all the other ones? You mentioned a lot Rough Guides, the Moon Guides, Let’s Go…

Tony: Yeah, we were a bit ahead of Rough Guides, and that was an element, and I think it was a bunch of factors. I think in some ways we were a little more driven, a little more business minded about it. I mean that certainly played a factor, and you know, we just chose some of the better places, and there was a whole bunch of reasons. I think as it grew, one of the factors was that we remained totally focused on it. We didn’t get into other things, and other distractions. I think that played an element in it as well. It was really a number of factors that took us ahead of the others.

Jason: How did you keep that focus on that area? I’m sure there were a lot of other things that you thought about doing.

Tony: Yes, well I think a lot of it would have to go down to being obsessive about it, and I think I look back at what we did in the very early days, and we did some really good books, and we did some books that really weren’t that good at all, but they were the only things out there. So they were the best books available because there was nothing else available. So there was that element to it, but I think the obsessive thing, we did what we wanted to do, and there was very much you know, if we believed in a project, then we did that project. Even though if the head had been ruling rather than the heart, we would have thought “no, there is no money in this”, so this makes more sense. We should have done that, but we didn’t. We did what we wanted to do.

Jason: Got you. At the beginning, with just Maureen and yourself, how did you break up the work between yourselves?

Tony: Pretty much the way things worked out, that I think I was the more creative element in it. It took both of us working flat out all the time. I look back at our early days, and I’m kind of amazed how many books we did put out in the first few years. And as I say, some of them weren’t great works of art, but they were the best thing going. But it was pretty much I’ll do this and you do that, and on it went. I think one of the things… we soon started getting other people writing the books with us, and people came to us, and they saw what we were doing, and they liked the idea, and they had similar sorts of ideas. And it kicked off from there, but it was certainly amatuerish, but there were people with the same sort of enthusiasm. So, when you have that enthusiasm, people tend to go along with you. They like what you do and they want to do something similar.

Jason: Got you. Actually, that was going to be one of my questions. How did you find those first writers?

Tony: it’s a major difference to the way it is today. Today there are lots of people writing books. We’ve got writers who we asked them how they got into this. They said, “I went to a university. I want to be travel writer, and I will study something whether it’s a language, or Asian history, or political studies, or something that gives me a foot in the door of that field.” Where as that really wasn’t there. There weren’t people with a career path to be travel writers back in our day. It was very much someone had gone there and they had used our book somewhere else, and gone to some other place we hadn’t done a book about, and they came to us and said, “Hey, I can do this.” And we, more or less said, “Ok, go and do it!” And sure enough some of them did. Some of them fell on their face completely, but some of them definitely did.

Jason: So, it was more along the lines of they found you?

Tony: Yes, very much so. Other people really did find us. I say that, and then I think of our first Africa guy, we found the Africa guy, we knew he was doing something else. It wasn’t always that way. But then, as we sort of developed, and got a bit bigger, it was a question of we had arrived here and done something, and we said well why don’t we do something else as well? What they were doing before, they were doing a book for us, and they were doing something else to keep themselves alive, and suddenly they became full-time travel writers.

Jason: So, going back again to your first book. Did you get any feedback on it?

Tony: You know, you look at all the social networking sites today, and really, we were doing exactly that same thing back then, except the information would come in on post cards. I really wish we would have kept more of this. I was talking to somebody a week or so ago about the material we collected, and how interesting it would be today to go through it. Because a lot of people did start writing to us very early on, and it was very much letters and postcards, and you could tell how they were enthusiastic about what you were doing by the amount of time they put into it.

People don’t sit down and write you a long letter of corrections and suggestions and ideas and so on, given that they’re making no return on this at all; that they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart, as it were. But they like what you’re doing, and they want to help out.

And isn’t that exactly what people do today?  I mean, the whole Wikipedia creation is because people like putting that information out there.  If it’s wrong they like correcting it, if they know something else they like adding to it.

And that’s exactly what we had all those years ago.

Jason:  That’s cool.  You don’t think about it sometimes in that way, at least I don’t.  Did you try to collect any feedback before you went out to try to sell it, or, how did that process work?

Tony:  No, the first book we did; I say the first book as if there were no predecessor to it, but there was.  When we set out we were in London before we set out on our first trip, and there was an operation in London called the Bit Guides.

Bits was a sort of creation of the 60′s.  An information center, if you needed a lawyer because you’d gotten yourself in trouble they’d find you a lawyer, or if you couldn’t find a place to stay they’d find you somewhere to stay.

Bits did all sorts of good things in the 60’s era, and one of the ways they supported it was this thing called the Bit Guides.  They had a Bit Guide for South America, to Africa, and to Asia. And it was really just people sending them letters back, and they mimeographed these letters off.  The only way to get it was you went round to their office in London, pay them a pound, and you got handed these pages of mimeographed information.  And it was just chaotic and it wasn’t organized in any fashion at all, but you could scour through it and find things.

The guy who was there putting together this information, a guy called Jeff Cromwell, he then later on became our author for Africa and then made us lots of other things.  Bits sort of fell apart a year or two after that.  That’s how come Jeff joined us.

Jason:  Gotcha.  So with that first book that you said you…, did you say you tried to get feedback on it?

Tony: The first one we hadn’t set out from London with the idea of getting to Australia and writing a book at the end, at all.  That never occurred to us.

It was only after we got to Australia that people started asking us where did you go, how did you do, what happened?  We thought with the notes we’d got and the information we collected, our diary, and with a bit more research we could put something together.

So the first book we did came about after the trip.  It wasn’t fully researched along the way at all.  Fortunately we had ended up doing some research along the way, but the book was an accident.

Whereas, the second book we did, which we researched in 1974, that was a project researched from the very start.

Jason:  Gotcha.  So with that first book, how did you find your first customers?

Tony:  Well, I remember very clearly I started putting it together.  It started at first just as writing notes for people we’d met, and that said, “Oh, I think I’m doing something similar.”, and I’d say “Okay, I’ll write some notes down and send to you next week”.  And that just grew and grew, and before we knew it we were thinking instead of writing notes and giving them to people, why don’t we write notes and sell them to people?

We bumped into Bill Dalton doing exactly the same (you know, he’s the guy who started Green Publications), and we bumped into him at a sort of silly street fair sitting on the sidewalk selling his notes to Indonesia for fifty cents or seventy-five or something.

And that was a very, very similar sort of thing.  Well we started putting the notes together and as it grew I began thinking of making a book out of it I went into a bookshop in Sydney and sat down with a guy who ran the little travel department, just a handful of shelves back then, and told him what I was thinking of doing.  He said, “If you turn that into a book I’ll buy fifty copies.”

When it did change into a book, the first place I went was to him.  I said, “Here I am, here’s the book, order fifty copies now, please.”

Jason:  And did he?

Tony:  Yes, absolutely he did, and that’s where it got started.  We went to the shop next door and sold them twenty, and down the street and sold another ten.  I took a day off work and went around the bookshops and sold them.

Jason:  Wow, and the feedback was very good from all the bookshops?

Tony:  Yeah, it sold immediately.  Selling anything requires publicity and things, and one of the shops we sold it to, the guy who ran the shop, his girlfriend’s a journalist, and he told her about it and she gave us a call, and before we knew it we had a story in the newspaper.  And then a breakfast time TV program picked it up, and… Back then all those things worked, and within a couple of weeks we’d sold out and printed more and began to think, well, where do we go?  Let’s create the business we eventually had.

Jason:  So then after the first book, what was the next step for the company?

Tony:  Well, we were living in Sydney and planned, when we arrived in Sydney — Well, the plan at first was to stay for three months, but we extended that to staying for a year.  We had then planned to spend another year traveling on our way back to London.  And we decided no, we wouldn’t do that, what we would do is spend another year just traveling in Southeast Asia and we’d create a Southeast Asian guide from that travel.  So the next year, which was 1974, we spent the whole year just traveling around Southeast Asia, and totally with the aim of producing a guidebook about Southeast Asia at the end of our travels.

Jason:  While you were there, did you continue to sell the first book at all?

Tony:  We had a friend who we’d left the remaining copies sitting in his apartment, and he sent out the orders and so on.  It was slipshod, but the thing at least kept going the next twelve months.  Brought a little bit of money in, and at the end of the twelve months we came back to Australia and resurrected the first book, and published the second book, and started looking for other books to do.

Jason:  How did you choose the destinations at the beginning?

Tony:  The first one, we did the cross-Asia book because we’d traveled across Asia.  The second book, we did Southeast Asia because we had come down through Southeast Asia at the end, and we could see what was happening there, that it was just starting to take off as a destination.  Thailand, what was Thailand at that time?  It was R&R from the Vietnam War.  But the Vietnam War was ending, and the Thais were looking for other sorts of tourism.  It was all started to happen in that region.  Southeast Asia was a very obvious thing.

Then the next book we did was a Nepal guide, and again, we’d come through Nepal, and Nepal was, everyone wanted to go there to go trekking.  We met up with a local author and put together a guide to Nepal.  And then to some extent it was things we could do.  We knew this guy who’d done the Africa thing for Bits, so we suggested to him that he turn his Africa guide, his Africa Bit experience into a real guidebook to Africa.  And we were in Australia, so let’s do an Australia guide, and New Zealand was small enough that you could knock it off in a short period of time, so we did a New Zealand guide.  We knew a journalist we’d met traveling around Asia, she was living in Hong Kong, so we said to her “Let’s do a Hong Kong guide.”  And that’s the way it grew.

Jason:  It’s interesting, the choices that you made in the destinations.  If you were trying to maybe go for biggest bang for your buck you may have tried to go after the U.S. or Western Europe.

Tony:  Well, absolutely.  We definitely didn’t, because we looked and said, the publishers are in New York and London, doing those places, and we’re far too small to compete with big dollars like they are.  But we kept on, the next four or five years, picking up little books that we could do.  Thailand was a small enough destination.  Burma, Sri Lanka was a destination you could knock off in a relatively limited period of time.

The real transition for us was when did a guide to India, we did an India guide in the late 70s.  And India was an obvious destination for us, it was an Asian destination, it was an area where lots of young people were going to.  Huge amount of interest in it.  There wasn’t much competition; there were a couple of India guides, but they were not the right sort of books in all sorts of ways.  But doing India was a big project, and in the first couple of years of our existence, there’s no way we could have found the time or the money or anything else to do India.  It was only when we’d got to about our 18th book, when we got to 15, 16, 17 books, and we thought, “Hey, we could put enough aside, enough time and money and research time to do India.”  And India took a year’s research.  It took three teams, myself and Maureen, and two other writers. And we each effectively spent 4 months there, so there was a year’s on the ground research to do it.

Jason:  Incredible effort.

Tony:  Yeah, it was.  I look back on it, you know, we were sort of betting the bank on one project.  We’d had books that you could do in 6 weeks or 2 months work, and suddenly jump to a book that took a year’s research, that was a big task.

Jason:  I want to be respectful of your time.  Do you have a hard stop at 2:30?

Tony:  No, no.  I’ll keep talking.

Jason:  Thank you, I appreciate it.  I’m asking too many questions at the beginning here.  Actually, while you were talking I thought of another question.  How did you break up your time writing versus running the business?

Tony:  Well, what we realized fairly early on is that you can’t be doing both.  You’re either away traveling and researching the books, or you’re home at the office selling the books and making sure the money comes in, and all those sorts of things.  We obviously got some staff in to take the orders and so on, but Maureen and I were the ones who produced the book and we didn’t have staff to sell the book and send them out if we weren’t there. While we were away traveling book production stopped.  So at some point fairly early we had to change that.

So what we did was take on a business partner, a young guy we knew who had his own publishing house and indeed had even done one travel book for STA – Student Travel of Australia as it was known in those days.  Then he quit for a full time job and had done that for a year or two but wasn’t totally happy with it so we said to him, why don’t you come join us and take a stake in the company?  He didn’t buy his way into the company, he just came in for his expertise.  He was the one who stayed home, minded the shop and did things while we were away traveling.  Really, that’s what allowed us to do India, because he was there while we were away traveling in India for months.

Jason:  Did you ever look for or receive funding for the business?

Tony:  No.  Well, we tried, but I think at that point the sort of venture capital funding you might find today wasn’t readily available for our sort of business, and I think if you tried to tell anybody, “I’ve got this idea, we’re going to do guidebooks to places that nobody else in the world would do a guidebook to, for young people who’ve got no money to go there” they would have said “Get a life.”  It wasn’t a feasible thing to do.  The only real money we had in the early days we managed to persuade the bank to give us a bank loan, but that was totally done because my parents guaranteed it.  That really was the only money we had for many years.

Jason:  Wow, incredible. So another thing that I found interesting is that you started and ran this business successfully with your wife.  Did Lonely Planet ever put a strain on your marriage, or vice versa?

Tony:  Oh, yeah, I think so.  It’s like travel puts a strain on relationships and marriage as well.  If you come through, it proves something works. There are successful husbands and wives things here, and I think very often when they do work it’s because the partners do mark out their own territory and do their own thing.  You really could point at some where the relationship has broken down, you know – the husband and wife thing, but they’ve carried on business-wise.  It’s kind of strange how the business can outlast the relationship sometimes.

Jason:  Any tips keeping a marriage healthy with a business on the side?

Tony:  I think you each have to have your own territory and respect the boundary between it.  You know, that’s your decision and this is my decision, and I do this better and you do that better.

Jason:  Yep.  So jumping ahead now, I mentioned that in your introduction that in 2007 you sold to the BBC.  Were you actively looking to sell the company at that point?

Tony:  Yeah, we were.  We hadn’t contemplated that the BBC would be the people we sold it to, but we’d sort of come to the realization that we weren’t going to run the thing forever and that there were areas that we really wanted more expertise like digital media, but we wanted more expertise and more muscle and more money than we were able to readily to provide, so we were looking outside and the BBC just happened to pop up.

Jason: So I’ve heard some people talk about a moment when the money hit the bank from selling their company, and the feelings along with it. Did you have a moment like that? And if so, what was it like?

Tony: The only real difference, I mean obviously we’re not, we’re not sort of working, I’m still working on Lonely Planet stuff. I’m still doing things, helping Lonely Planet or connected to Lonely Planet, whatever, I mean I do that most days. But, no it didn’t alter my life dramatically.

I mean the only thing it really did with suddenly having money in the bank was we, we bought a house in London and we’ve been thinking about buying. We’re in London quite often anyways, partly on business and partly from going there to somewhere else and just got fed up with staying in hotels. We thought, why don’t we buy some fine apartment or something and when we had more money, the apartment grew, that’s all. So, I mean, that was the only real change the money made.

Jason: Gotcha. So, switching gears again, what advice would you give to a new entrepreneur interested in travel?

Tony: Well, obviously it’s not a question of doing what we do, no one’s going to set up a book publishing company these days, because books are last years technology. We’re still doing OK at it, but we do a lot of other things as well. And I think that someone starting out in the travel field today would look for something else. You know, they are popping up all the time, it’s a new website or someone writing iPhone apps, or doing something with lots of openings in travel, no matter what they are. But I think it’s the same with any business. What you do is something you love. You know, and if you love doing it; that enthusiasm is going to be picked up by other people. If people can see that you’re absolutely crazy about what you’re doing they think, well hey, that might be, that must be good. I should be interested in it as well. Or, you know, hey I can trust that thing they’ve created because they’re such great believers in it. So, I think yeah, you’ve got to be doing something you believe in, you love doing and that’s how it works. If you didn’t love it, it wouldn’t work, and if it doesn’t work and you loved it, at least you had a good time doing it.

Jason: True. How about for the aspiring travel writer? What advice would you give someone trying to do that?

Tony: Be unique. I mean it’s often said that you don’t have to do anything really exciting to make a great book about it. People do really exciting things and write incredibly boring stuff about it or quite the reverse. Like I think in some ways Bill Bradley is a good example of this. Bill Bradley’s books were all really very… You know but he travels around England he travels around Australia, he travels around Europe. You don’t have to do anything absolute right out on the edge at all. But he writes about it with very interesting fashion. People love what he writes, so you know, it isn’t a question of you have to something exciting that makes it exciting, it’s a question of how well you write it. How well you create what you’re doing. How well you put it together. But it’s certainly a lot easier if you’re doing something that’s unique. The fact that you like Bill Bradley writing another book about England, well, big deal. There’s lots out there, but if you’re doing something that nobody else has done, you’ve got a head start on everybody else. Even if you aren’t the most exciting writer or the most exciting filmmaker or the most exciting creator in some way; if you’re the only one you’ve got a big head start. And if you manage to have that big head start and do something really good as well, then you’ve got an even bigger head start.

Jason: Yeah. Great. This is the last question then. What’s coming next for Tony Wheeler?

Tony: You know I don’t know. I’ve got some, I’ve got some projects I’m thinking of. Some more travel projects. Always travel projects, I mean everything I do is sort of travel related. I’ve wrote a book a couple of years ago. A few years ago now, it came out a new edition last year called “Bad Lands” where I went to first of all to Bush’s axis of evil and then I just added more places that for assorted reasons people have dubbed bad onto the list, Libya being one of them, of course. And Burma has a bad reputation because of government and Cuba well Fidel has carried out on and on and some people like him and some don’t. So I made up a list of interesting countries that you could say were bad, and I’m thinking of doing a sort of follow up to that. Because there’s lots of other places which may not be bad but might be very misguided.

Jason: Sound’s great. Well, that will do it.