Lonely planet india new edition
Taking on Lonely Planet would be another step forward for the commercial activities of the BBC’s Worldwide arm, the corporation’s moneymaking side. Pictures from Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s 1972 journey to Australia: Benoa Harbour, Bali © Tony/Maureen Wheeler & Richard I’Anson/Lonely Planet Images
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The guidebooks would continue, our long-mooted magazine would finally launch, the digital side would grow and with the BBC at the controls it was a no-brainer that TV had to expand dramatically. We had been successfully turning out Lonely Planet TV programmes since 1994 with the BBC behind us that was bound to grow. The message was that just as Top Gear was the BBC footprint in the motoring world, so Lonely Planet would have the same position for travel. We weren’t short of suitors, but the BBC seemed the perfect partner, with the digital muscle and expertise we needed. Lonely Planet wasn’t going to be a family dynasty and by 2007 we felt it was time we departed. Nevertheless, I confess, all this digital groundbreaking was not my first passion I still had a love affair with those old-fashioned print guidebooks.
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We had our own website soon afterwards and in 2000 we launched CitySync guidebooks on PalmPilots, those pre-smartphone mini-tablets. As early as 1994 we had a blog (although the word wasn’t invented for another five years) on Tim O’Reilly’s pioneering Global Network Navigator website. After all, we were writing our books using that fancy new “word processing” in the early 1980s when most publishers, if they had a computer at all, used it only for accounting. Though people often assume digital media came as an unwelcome challenge to the guidebook publishers, I think we can claim we were digital pioneers. Almost from the beginning I was confident that Lonely Planet would “work”, I just had no idea how well it would work and how a “Lonely Planet traveller” would become shorthand for a certain type of wanderer - not always young, but with an approach to travel and its importance to the world that I felt very strongly about. We were, however, very surprised when that one book was followed by hundreds of others, Lonely Planet offices popped up around the world and each year we unleashed what felt like an army of writers, researchers, photographers and cartographers to explore every country on Earth. Pictures from Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s 1972 journey to Australia: on the Ganges at Varanasi, India © Tony/Maureen Wheeler & Richard I’Anson/Lonely Planet Images With edition 19 appearing soon, sales of Southeast Asia on a Shoestring are now in the millions. In the following years we weren’t surprised when it found its way into so many backpacks. On trip two we could visualise the guide that would follow from the day we rode that motorcycle out of Sydney.
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The first trip across Asia had been enormous fun, but the idea that it was the foundation for an international business certainly wasn’t part of the picture. Of course we had no idea what we’d stumbled on, although years later it seemed obvious that this was the perfect moment to launch a travel publishing empire: the baby boomers were coming of age, jumbo jets were taking to the air and the hippie trail and the “Marrakesh Express” were on every young traveller’s mind.Ī year later we were exploring south-east Asia on a motorcycle, but by this time our travels were completely different. Maureen would bring hers home from the office each Friday night and we’d spend the weekend hammering out the text on the kitchen table in our basement flat in Sydney. We didn’t even have a typewriter when we put together that first guidebook. Months later we arrived, penniless, in Australia, decided our plan to circle the world in a year and “get travel out of our systems” was doomed, and a few months later created something that would ensure we’d never kick our travel habit: Lonely Planet. That dirt-cheap car carried us all the way to Afghanistan. Our backpacks contained some clothes, but they were mainly stuffed with dreams.
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Times change these days MBA graduates emerge with a backpack full of debts and need to start earning fast to pay them off. I’d just graduated from London Business School with an MBA, and the plan was we’d travel as far as that £65 car would carry us.
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In July 1972, my wife Maureen and I jumped in a Mini Traveller and left England heading east.