For overseas travellers, there’s one little book that’s probably just as important a travel requirement as their passport: the Lonely Planet guidebook.
The global guidebook’s founder pays a tribute to the country that helped his business grow big
HONG KONG: For overseas travellers, there’s one little book that’s probably just as important a travel requirement as their passport: the Lonely Planet guidebook, of course. The biggest brand in travel publishing, Lonely Planet is today a hugely successful global business: last year, it sold over 6 million copies of guidebooks to various destinations.
But back in 1981, when the fledgling company had barely a handful of titles that sold no more than a few thousand copies, it was the India guidebook that propelled Lonely Planet into a higher and more stable orbit, acknowledges the group’s founder Tony Wheeler.
“The India guidebook quickly boosted from being a small business to a bigger and much-better-off small business,” Wheeler, who was recently in Hong Kong, told DNA.
“Our first few guidebooks sold maybe 10,000 or 15,000 copies; some of our bigger sellers sold maybe 20,000 copies. But suddenly, this India book put us on another plateau: it was a much bigger seller, at a much higher price.”
Wheeler reckons that the India guidebook was hugely successful because there was “a pent-up demand for it, given that there was a lot of interest in India… I think India has always been one of those places that people don’t go to too blithely; they go there with a real interest in the place. From that perspective, it was really good territory to do as a guidebook.”
Does he think Lonely Planet would have been just as successful if it had come out with a guidebook on another large continent — the US, for instance — at that time? Not really, says Wheeler. “Our US guidebook is now a very big seller. But today we are a very different company from what we were then.
If we’d had done a US guidebook back in 1981, we’d have sold reasonable quantities of it, but it wouldn’t have sold the sort of quantities (the India guidebook did). We’d have been going into a relatively crowded market, whereas the India book went into a relatively open market and there was really no direct competitor.”
Wheeler points out that the India guidebook also serviced Lonely Planet’s reputation in 1981 as “an Asia guidebook specialist”.
For a year or two after the India guidebook was launched, it was Lonely Planet’s best selling title, although at some point in the late 1980s, Thailand overtook it. “But it’s still one of our better-selling titles,” says Wheeler. “India is still consistently a Top 5 or Top 10 title.”
Apart from being a huge commercial success, the India guidebook also gave Lonely Planet critical acclaim for the first time: it won the Thomas Cook award for travel writing. Which is perhaps why India still holds a pride of place in Wheeler’s heart.
“If you ask me which of Lonely Planet’s guidebooks I am most proud of or which I had the most involvement with, I would still say it’s our India book. It’s a book I still have a great deal of affection for.”
Tony and his wife Maureen share another emotional bond with India as well. Their daughter was conceived just before the Wheelers travelled to India to research that guidebook in 1981. And it was a visit to Leh, in Ladakh, that gave their daughter her name: Tashi, which means ‘blessing’.
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