Travel Happy

Publishing over 650 travel titles, Lonely Planet are responsible for a quarter of all travel guidebooks currently in print. The company came out about from Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s self-published handbook “Across Asia on the Cheap” over 20 years ago. Here they discuss the startling success of their company

Lengthy and interesting interview with Tony and Maureen Wheeler, founder of Lonely Planet, at SFGate.com

And that, some say, is precisely why guidebooks exist: to escort readers physically and intellectually through another culture and to tackle the stereotyping and ignorance that leads to fear and misunderstanding. “We first made our name in Asian and developing-world travel, places that weren’t on the regular radar screen at the time. And I’d like to think we also made our name with an attitude toward travel, the need or desire to understand a place better before you go there,” Tony says.