Tony & Maureen Wheeler - Lonely Planet

Travelling the world to write about it sounds like a dream job (especially for us journalists), but Tony and Maureen Wheeler insist it is hard work. Sixty million books later, they talk to Rebecca Spicer about how they’ve used their passion for travel to build one of the world’s most renowned brands, Lonely Planet.

Few serious travellers would set out for an overseas adventure without a Lonely Planet visitor guide. They are so much part of travel culture these days, it’s easy to forget they’ve only been around since 1973, when Tony and Maureen Wheeler produced their first title, Across Asia on the Cheap.

Originally from London, the couple took time out to travel after studying with the intention of returning home after about a year to ‘settle down’. But their plans changed. After travelling through Asia, the couple arrived in Australia with 27 cents in their pockets and a camera (which they soon sold). People kept asking about their travels: ‘where have you been, how did you get there, how much did it cost?’ So they decided to turn their diaries into their first book, providing practical travel information as well as background on the culture and history of the countries they’d travelled through. They printed an initial 1,500 copies with Tony and Maureen hand-collating, trimming and stapling each one. Retailing for a mere $1.80, it only took a week for Sydney bookshops to sell out. Within three months, 8,000 copies had been sold.

 Sales from the first book enabled the couple to set off travelling again. “We left Australia to travel through South-East Asia after we did the first book,” recalls Maureen. After travelling for a year they ended up in Singapore, putting together their second guide, South-East Asia on a Shoestring, in a backstreet hotel in 1975. Since then around half a million copies of the guide have been sold worldwide, and it’s now in its eleventh edition.

“When that was finished we decided to come back to Australia for a while—it just ended up being a long while,” says Maureen of the couple settling here.

The Lonely Planet brand has since become synonymous with travel, with the name inspired by a Joe Cocker and Leon Russell song, Space Captain. The pair sing about a “lovely planet”, but when Tony first listened to the song he heard "lonely planet", liked it and it stuck.

While they call Australia home, Tony and Maureen are never far from their next trip. The duo handled the business alone for the first seven years of its life, and grew Lonely Planet slowly. Cautious about borrowing money, they grew the business one book at a time. “Every time we sold a book we would travel and do another, and the business grew very slowly,” says Maureen. It was self-funded, each book paying for the next, which she admits was one of the biggest challenges the business faced while trying to grow, along with finding the right people to join the Lonely Planet team.

They started taking on other authors almost immediately, as well as looking for outside markets to export to—their first big pre-order was from a Singaporean bookshop.

“We have certainly become a presence globally in travel,” says Maureen of their almost instant international expansion. The runaway success of their second title played a huge part in allowing them to expand into the UK, US and other parts of Asia. And today, they’re proud to say the Lonely Planet guides are available on every continent in the world.

In fact, only last year the couple were honoured as Export Heroes by the Australian Institute of Export, which Tony says is always satisfying, gaining such recognition. “Of course there’s a great buzz to be doing well in not just your home market but in overseas ones as well.”

By 1980 Tony and Maureen realised they’d need to bring some staff in to help run the business. “We were finding it increasingly hard to travel and run the business,” explains Maureen. So they hired Jim Hart to act as the stay-at-home business manager, and opened their first official office, now based in Melbourne.