The road to success

LONELY PLANET is the largest independent travel book company in the English-speaking world. It produces 600 travel guides as well as food guides, phrase books, maps, atlases and videos. Its head office is in Melbourne, Australia, and it has offices in London, Paris and California. For millions of independent travelers, Lonely Planet guides are "the bibles of adventure travel" and they never travel without them.

In 1972, Tony and Maureen Wheeler bought a mini-van for £100 and left England on a jouney to Australia. They travelled thought Europe, the Middle East and Asia. They lived very cheaply and didn't spend much money.

"Cheap, independent, adventure travel was a new idea at that time", Tony says, "and a lot of people were interested in our 11,000-mile journey. They asked us about the routes we followed, the places we went to, the things we saw and where we ate. At that time there weren't any books about budget travel so we decided to write one. We didn't have a typewriter so Maureen borrowed one from work. We worked on the book in the evenings and at weekends"

When they finished the book Tony took it to bookshops in Sydney. The buyer at on shop really liked the book and showed it to his girlfriend, who was a jounalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. She wrote an article about it. Then a TV channel invited Tony to appear in a programme. A lot of people were interested in the book and in independent travel. More and more shops began to sell the book. It was the start of the £30 million Lonely Planet publishing company.