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Wheeler dealer

25.09.08 Victoria Arnstein

Tony Wheeler is in unbelieveably sprightly form considering he has flown in from Australia only a few hours before our meeting. But, of course, the Lonely Planet co-founder is no stranger to travel.

He also seems incredibly relaxed given that he has arrived in the UK at a time when Lonely Planet is in the limelight again over its controversial majority takeover by BBC Worldwide—albeit a deal that was done 12 months ago. "It's not my worry anymore," he jokes. "It is only 25% my worry, it is 75% the BBC's worry."

Among other things, Wheeler is in the UK to promote his and wife Maureen's new book, The Lonely Planet Story: Once While Travelling (Crimson), which recounts how they started the now world-famous travel publisher in 1973 
following a year-long trip around the world, up to the point where they sold the majority interest to BBC Worldwide, the broadcaster's commercial arm, and beyond.
Although the acquisition happened last October, taking a 75% stake in Lonely Planet for a sum reported to be between £70m and £100m, some competitors are still unhappy because they believe the publisher is being given an unfair advantage. They also argue that because the BBC collects licence fees from viewers, it should not be able to do commercial deals.

Tony Elliot, founder of Time Out, has been particularly vocal in his opposition, launching a new attack over BBC Worldwide's involvement with Lonely Planet at the Edinburgh Television Festival in August.

Elliot's plea to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for an investigation into the buy-out has not been taken up, but the Publishers Association is to make a submission to the Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee into the commercial operations of the BBC. There have also been reports that the chairman of the Culture, Media & Sport Committee has concerns about the number of links to the Lonely Planet website from the BBC website and Lonely Planet travel editor Tom Hall's 
frequent appearances on the BBC.

Wheeler says he is not worried about the recent calls for an inquiry into the deal. "I think BBC Worldwide has a good case to defend 
its position."

In fact, Wheeler says he thinks Elliot's complaints are "sour grapes on his part". Recalling when Pearson bought Rough Guides, Wheeler says: "I thought, ‘Oh shit, this is terrible.' They have DK already, now they have Rough Guides and they distributed Time Out at the time." He says one of the first things that happened was that if you bought a Rough Guide, you got a Penguin book free so you had a novel to read on the beach. "We [had] no way of competing with that. I thought, ‘Oh, this is unfair', but I'm not a British company so I couldn't go and complain to the OFT about it."
What does he think will come of the Lonely Planet brand? Will perception of it change due to BBC Worldwide's involvement? Wheeler doesn't think so.

Neither does he think recent negative publicity, including the media storm over the claim made by former Lonely Planet writer Thomas Kohnstamm, who said he wasn't paid enough to visit Colombia despite updating a guide for the country, will do any lasting harm to the brand.

"I think it is inevitable when you get to a certain size that you are going to have some things that don't quite work out. You are going to have a rogue author or someone who has done something wrong."

Wheeler adds that after the Kohnstamm story broke, Lonely Planet sent researchers to the 
places he had written about in order 
to check his work. "Some of the things had been updated anyway and other things were reviewed and they were okay. I don't think he did as bad a job as he claimed."

Another criticism Wheeler rebuffs is that Lonely Planet—particularly its travel editor and media spokesperson Tom Hall—gets too much air time. "[Hall] is a very good spokesperson and if you were to look at where Tom's name has popped up over five years, he would have been on just as many BBC programmes 12 months ago as he is today."

International brand
Lonely Planet, whose brand is now recognised on an international scale, was started after Tony and Maureen took a year-long trip around the world in mid-1972. The result was their first title, Across Asia on the Cheap, published largely because the couple were asked so many questions about their experience.

The next guide, South-East Asia on a Shoestring, was a more deliberate project. "We did one book and people liked it, so we did another. We had a feeling people enjoyed it. People say ‘Wow, you really saw a gap in the market', but we didn't, then afterwards you [realise] you did hit the right thing at the right time."

Today, the company has offices on three continents, with headquarters in Australia, 500 employees, 350 writers and more than 500 titles in print. The Wheelers, who divide their time between their homes in Melbourne and London, still sit on the board and their two children, Tashi and Kieran, also currently work for Lonely Planet, although the Wheelers never imagined the company would become a "family dynasty". Neither had they imagined it becoming a publicly owned company.
"If we had drawn up a list of who we thought would be contenders, [BBC Worldwide] weren't part of it," Wheeler admits. When they were approached by the BBC, Wheeler says he thought it was a bit "left-field" but something they could see working. "It has been nearly 12 months now and we are totally happy with how it has gone," he adds.

When asked whether the more obvious route would have been to sell to a competitor, Wheeler says they weren't very enthusiastic about selling to another publisher. "We have had lots of people all along who said: ‘If you want to sell, talk to us'. Some of them we respect and like, but we wouldn't want to be owned by them."

Selling to a conglomerate did not seem like a viable option either. "If you are part of a larger publishing house and travel has a downturn, [they say] let's put more energy into cookbooks. We have never had that. If travel has a downturn, we just pedal harder to keep up."

Wheeler says that he and Maureen had started to take more of a back seat in the running of the business even before the BBC Worldwide acquisition. "I think that in some ways people have to make their own mistakes," he explains. "[People] can't do good things unless they make mistakes, and if they don't make mistakes they haven't tried hard enough."
 
Competitive field
So what does Wheeler think about the current state of travel publishing in the UK? "It is a very competitive field. On one hand no one likes competition but also competition is a good thing. It makes you work harder."

When travelling, which he still does frequently, Wheeler often takes along a copy of a competitor's guidebook, either to test them out or when Lonely Planet doesn't have a guide to a particular area. "I often buy Bradt because they are good at putting out books to really obscure places. We have one or two at the moment that don't really make financial sense but you really want to do them."
Wheeler says he is under no 
illusion that The Lonely Planet Story will be a bestseller, but hopes it will be of interest to both people who like travel and business books, as well as being a title that will backlist well.

It has already been released in Australia (where the company is registered) America and, bizarrely, China, where Lonely Planet has only been selling Chinese translations for around 18 months.
"The fact that they would want to read a book about Lonely Planet seemed ridiculous," laughs Wheeler. "When the publisher said they wanted to translate the book into Chinese, I said, ‘Who the hell is going to read that'? When we went there, we went into a bookshop and looked at the top 10 bestselling titles and it was there at number four."

The title was published by Penguin in Australia and Crimson in the UK. Wheeler says he didn't want the book to be published by Lonely Planet in case it just seemed like vanity publishing. He was also worried that Lonely Planet editors would be too close to him to be critical.

Does Wheeler think travel books have a long-term future? "I think at some stage there will be a way of carrying this [information] in a more compact way," he says. "It may be on your computer but it is going to take three minutes to boot up and then the battery is going to go flat. I think for a long time we will be researching guidebooks, the only thing I don't know is whether what we write will appear on paper."

Wheeler still has plenty of places he would love to explore and reveals that he would also like to write more. "I wrote a book called Bad Lands 
a few years ago and the idea of a 
second one really appeals to me," 
he says.

There are other projects in mind but he doesn't want to talk about these in case someone pinches his idea. Whatever he has on his agenda, you can be sure Wheeler will be keeping busy. He doesn't seem like a man who will sit still for very long.

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