the lonely planet story

If you like travelogues, then this will appeal to you because this is the story of travel publishing's biggest name. You read about the start of the Lonely Planet, its growth into one of the world's most successful series of travel guides, and you get to learn of the authors' initial travels that gave birth to their first guidebook. As a bonus, you also get a little glimpse of the family struggles of traveller-publisher parents that are Tony and Maureen Wheeler. Someone cleverly observed the significance of their name: Wheeler. With a name like that, no wonder they are doing what they are doing.

As the writers would like us to believe, Lonely Planet started as a bit of an accident. They were responding to questions like "How do you get from here to there? And not get sick?” And spend only shoestrings? Thinking they might as well get paid for the advice dispensed, they wrote a guidebook on Asia based on their first UK-to-Australia trip that ended up with them migrating Down Under.

In turn, this book also is a response to the question: "How did two backpackers with twenty-seven cents to their names end up running a multinational company?" Well, if I might be allowed to add to their story: with a lot of courage, passion, spontaneity and just sheer blindness - blindness to the difficulties that lay ahead, that was. In life, we always have to choose to focus on certain things and ignore others. The Wheelers had chosen to ignore the difficulties of being the pioneer and going where not many people had gone before.

The book starts as a straightforward travel story with them deciding to spend one year making an overland trip from UK to Australia to "get travel out of [their] systems..."before they settled down to a 9-5 routine. It transforms later into an insider account of their rough-and-tumble trial-and-error process of publishing. You get the feeling that it was all an experiment starting from conceptualising the first book, to deciding to write the second book, to publishing their own and finally to doing it full-time. The book also makes you realise that like all start-ups, the Wheelers had their fair share of problems. You also get the feeling that they had never left the unstable period of starting up, as they face crisis after crisis. That is when, halfway through, the book loses its central plot, and Tony goes into an issue-by-issue recount of challenges in all the various facets of business as they arose and got tackled: printing, advertising, copyright and so on.

Furthermore, Tony’s personal voice helps the reader find a personal connection with the couple as they tackle the problems. For example, in the beginning there was always a struggle to find the money to pay for everything, so that even a trip to Europe to participate in a book fair had to be sponsored by a business partner. In a way, when we are employee, we never think about how everything is to be paid for. We rest assured that expenditure is to be reimbursed. But the owners recognise that reimbursements and travel expenses come from their own money! This is a particularly relevant insight presently as I extricate myself from permanent employment, so that I am employed on 'casual contracts'. This means that I'm pretty much independent: I get paid only when I work, I don't get annual leave, no medical benefits, and no expense account. My bank account is my expense account. The good thing is I get the illusion of independence.

So the book traces the development of the company, and parallels it with the growth of the family, allowing readers more than a glimpse into their family life. Gradually, Lonely Planet became financially stable, and it expanded overseas, but it also became corporatised and impersonal. At the same time the family also grew, as they acquired two children, Tashi and Kieran, both of whom became experienced travellers as they accompanied their parents overseas practically as soon as they were born. The writers even shares with us a period of difficulty in the marriage (and of course growing-teenager problems with their children Tashi and Kieran). What is pretty surprising to read about (I'm not an Asian chauvinist! Maybe just ignorant) is that the Wheelers actually called back home to their parents in the UK to report on where they were as they moved from country to country on that first trip around the world. And their parents actually became worried when they neglected to call (you can't find phones easily in some places).

It is a pleasant read. If you have enjoyed reading their easy-to-read guidebooks, this book provides another guide - into greater insight into the company’s growth and the Wheelers' family lives.