By DPA
Sydney : Lonely Planet guidebook tycoons Tony and Maureen Wheeler met on a park bench in London 35 years ago. They were soon gallivanting across Europe and Asia and into the business folklore of Australia. This month, ostensibly to spend more time travelling, the publishers of a quarter of the world’s English-language guidebooks sold to BBC Worldwide a majority stake in their $86 million Melbourne publishing company.
“The majority of the dollars coming in the business is still printed books but, if you look at the brand, the digital side is the side that is growing faster,” Tony Wheeler, 60, said of a company that has 500 titles and last year sold six million copies. “It needed more muscle and more expertise than we really felt we could provide for it.”
The Wheelers have wearied of big business in the internet age. They are not alone. Mark Ellingham, the co-founder of the rival Rough Guides business, sold a controlling interest to giant publisher Penguin in 1996 and this month announced he was leaving the company.
There’s a been-there-done-that element to the Wheelers’ exit. They now travel in the pointy end of planes rather than in economy and stay in hotels where there’s likely to be a Swiss chocolate on the pillow of their turned-down bed.
They themselves are nostalgic for the pre-computer days when guidebooks didn’t have to be updated so frequently. Authorship, once individual, is now corporate.
“Those vivid colours of the early books, once they get blended with so many other authors and editors and concerns about what the customer wants, they inevitably become grey and bland,” Tony Wheeler said a couple of years ago.
Maureen Wheeler, the more managerial of the English-Irish couple, has reminisced about the old days when the business was an adventure and the staff were fellow budget travellers.
“I used to feel that Lonely Planet was very real – we’d steam stamps off letters and reuse them, and everyone who worked there became our friends. Then we hired all these people,” she said.
When they wrote their first big-selling guidebook in 1975, “South-East Asia on a Shoestring”, the more intrepid baby boomers were boarding the early-model Boeing 747s of newly deregulated airlines for long-haul flights to what were then exotic locations like Singapore and Hong Kong.
The Vietnam War had just ended and the fears about terrorism and global warming were a mortgage and a couple of kids away.
The Wheelers, themselves parents of two children who are in their 20s, have kept pace with changes that have seen airport terminals filled with youngsters armed with credit cards who don’t expect to have to carry their massive backpacks further than the lift lobby.
Lonely Planet was quick to get into television, into hotel reservations and into downloadable guides that were bespoke amalgams of chapters from different books. The company was an early believer in donating to charity and was proved wise in not accepting advertising or money for endorsements.
But the Wheelers are not naturals in cyberspace. “The digital side isn’t our bag as much,” Tony Wheeler said. “We thought if we were going to do It properly, we had to do it with someone else – and the BBC popped up.”
Perhaps it’s their predisposition to the counter-culture of the 1970s that makes the Wheelers unsuited to the bland world their brand is joining.
Listen, and weep, to the management-speak of BBC Worldwide chief executive John Smith: “Lonely Planet is a highly respected nternational brand and a global leader in the provision of travel information. This deal fits well with our strategy to create one of the world’s leading content businesses, to grow our portfolio of content brands online and to increase our operations in Australia and America.”
The Wheelers, who travel half the year and have visited over 100 countries, will retain a quarter-share in the business. Advertising mogul John Singleton, who had held a one-third stake since 1999, gave up his shares to the BBC.
He said of the Lonely Planet business that “it’s a wonderful story, but it’s a tragedy it couldn’t stay in Australia.”
But at least the head office will remain in Melbourne. And the Wheelers picked the BBC because they didn’t want advertising to creep into their books.