THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: TONY WHEELER:THERE IS a globe in the library of the Galway hotel where I'm interviewing Tony Wheeler, a particularly apt object, given it is the world that has made him his fortune. Tony Wheeler is better known as Mr Lonely Planet, the title of the guide books series that sold their 100th millionth copy last month.
If you boarded a plane to go backpacking somewhere in the world in the past three decades, the chances are that if you weren’t carrying a
Lonely Planet
guidebook to the region, many people around you were.
Lonely Planet
, created in 1973, became the most ironic guidebook title possible, since so many of the places that the books mentioned soon became packed with people in search of the same idyllic beach, recommended guesthouse, or most obscure must-see temple.
Wheeler is in Galway to speak at a Fáilte Ireland forum, and he has spent the past few days on the Aran Islands. He’s brought some of the islands with him, in the form of mud on his jeans. “I got soaking wet out there,” he laughs, regarding the dried mud with surprise, as if seeing it for the first time.
Wheeler seems to be a man impressively uninterested in appearances. Apart from the muddy jeans, his socks are flecked with red polka dots, his shirt is striped blue and white, and the jacket is a grey fleece – the true giveaway of a regular traveller. It’s not the usual uniform of the corporate world, but the Aran Islands mud and mismatched casual clothing mask an extraordinarily shrewd businessman.
Along with his wife and co-founder, Maureen, Wheeler has created a phenomenally successful global brand. When the world’s most successful businessman and currently wealthiest person, Warren Buffet, visited Australia some years ago, he specifically requested a meeting with Wheeler.
Wheeler is slight, and very smiley, sporting the trademark square-framed, rather nerdy glasses he’s been photographed in for decades. He says “Look” and “it’s a bunch of things” a lot, as prefaces to sentences. He is wary of making any presumptive statements about why he thinks people want to travel. “Look, I don’t know what gives people a passion for travel,” he confesses, turning his coffee cup in his hand.
“It’s curious. You meet these people who didn’t have an opportunity to travel very much when they were younger and yet, when the opportunity presents itself, they grab it with both hands and never let it go.”
Wheeler was born in 1946, in Highcliffe-on-Sea in Dorset, England. His father was an airport manager at British Overseas Airways Corporation, later merged to form British Airways, which made for a transient childhood. When he was one, Wheeler’s family moved to Pakistan for five years, then on to the Bahamas and the US. “Did it make me interested in travel? I think it could have done, and I would say it did, but it didn’t to my brother or sister. So I don’t know.”
When the Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy was a child, she famously asked for an atlas and a bicycle for her 10th birthday. The Lonely Planetlegend is that Wheeler asked for a globe and a filing cabinet for his 10th birthday.
“I did ask for a globe, yeah,” he confirms now. “I remember I was a stamp collector, and I’d look at the stamps, and wonder where they came from. It was part of an early fascination with maps and countries.” He also loved planes and cars. The filing cabinet “came much later, when I was 12 or 13”. The esoteric request is a telling insight into the mind of a young boy who was already thinking about ways of arranging information he had collected. But why did a 12-year-old boy want something as seemingly unexciting as a filing cabinet for a birthday gift?
“Because I had a lot of things to file! All these notes and plans,” Wheeler explains. “They all needed to be kept in order.”
His methodical mind led him to an engineering degree, and then to a job in Chrysler as an automotive engineer. Aged 24, he was two weeks into an MBA at the London Business School when he bought a car magazine one lunchtime and sat on a bench in Regent’s Park to read it before going back to classes.
“Ten minutes later, this woman came by and sat down at the other end of the park bench. So what do you do? I chatted her up.”
The woman at the other end of the bench was Belfast-born Maureen, 20 years old, and just three days arrived from Belfast. The date they met was October 7th, 1970, and they married exactly a year later. “We got on instantly. We often talk about this; we say we started talking then, and we’ve never stopped since.”
When Wheeler finished his MBA, they went on honeymoon in 1972 – a nine-month journey across South-East Asia, which finished in Australia, at which point they had 27 cents left between them. The " Lonely Planetstory" that followed still appears at the back of every guidebook. Bombarded by questions and requests for tips, they collated the information from their diaries and notebooks, and Wheeler wrote Across Asia on the Cheap, which they self-published. It sold, and sold, and sold.
I have brought along with me a 1978 edition of this book, discovered years ago in a charity shop, with its lurid orange cover and wonky hand-drawn maps. It’s a sociological treasure of a time when Kabul was described as “a bit of a tourist trap”, and broke backpackers were advised if they were “really short of cash, you can always unload an armful, several places give a good price for blood”.
“That’s a blast from the past!” Wheeler exclaims delightedly, obligingly signing it for me with the words, “This is a nice reminder!”
These days, Lonely Planetguides tend to be either loved or loathed by the people who use them, because of their formulaic predictability. It could be Nepal or Wales or Ethiopia, but open a Lonely Planetnow, and you'll find the same information template, written in the same style of itinerary highlights, where to stay, where to eat etc.
Cumulatively, the books have the curiously surreal effect of reducing the world to a packaged set of pre-determined expectations, in much the same way that McDonald's serves up a similar menu around the world. Of course, this could be said of several guidebook series, but because Lonely Planettitles are by far the world's top selling guidebooks, and cover the most territory, predictably they attract the most criticism.
IT WAS NOTalways like this. Across Asia on the Cheapis written in an opinionated, idiosyncratic style, reflecting the Hippy Trail lingo of the time, with references to "freaks", "hanging", and "cats". In the Religion section, Hinduism is described as "such a comic book, Disneyland set-up, it is almost difficult to take it seriously"; Teheran is "a dreadful hole . . . dreadful, dreary, dull-grey tackiness"; Kuwait is dismissed in one sentence as "An oil-rich, super free-port, the lucky residents of Kuwait have cradle-to-grave care to such an extent that they hardly need to raise a finger."
The Wheelers went to the Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time in 1976, with four books. A year later, they were back with 10 books. “I don’t know how the hell we did it,” Wheeler admits. “And some of the books weren’t that good at all, but you know, we put them out there. On the other hand, they were the only book on the topic so they were the best thing going.”
Wheeler has a tendency to alight on the first few words of a question and canter off with them like a contestant on a game show, hoping to beat the clock by anticipating the rest of the sentence. It’s a habit of frequently-interviewed people: not listening to what’s being asked, but presenting ready-made answers to a different angle on the same question. I ask him about his travel kit, and what he personally always carries as essentials. The answer he gives is a short generic lecture on how people only need x, y and z, that they shouldn’t overpack, and they should wash their shirt each night. I hear him out. I repeat the question. He stares at me, confused. “Oh! My laptop. And a notebook. I have one on me right now.” He pats his jeans pocket. “I feel kind of unclothed if I don’t have a notebook and a pen with me.”
The fact is, Wheeler doesn’t need to do interviews or speaking engagements at all, so it’s really no wonder he’s not paying me his full attention. By contrast, Maureen, who is also in Galway, chooses not to engage with the media any more. “If someone asks if they can interview me, I’ll always say yes, and generally Maureen will say no.” (Our interview, for example, was last-minute.)
So why does he do it? After all, as he says, they now travel “at the sharp end of the aircraft” and they’re clearly extremely wealthy. “Yeah, I’ve got all the money I need,” Wheeler says frankly. “I could quit right now. I don’t need to do anything.” Later, he says: “Like I was saying earlier, I don’t have to do anything. I could sit at home. I don’t have to do interviews, or talks, or travel anywhere.”
In 2005, the Wheelers were the subject of a nine-page story in the New Yorker, when staff writer Tad Friend shadowed them for a couple of weeks, first at home in Melbourne and then on a guidebook field trip to Oman. Friend wrote: "Tony Wheeler is at least two people. Tony No 1 . . . is so self-contained that he appears, as a colleague puts it, 'almost socially retarded'. When he gave me a tour of Lonely Planet's head office, in Melbourne, not one of the 300 eager twenty- and thirty-somethings who work there greeted him as he passed . . . Like one of those dehydrated sponges which inflate to astonishing size when dropped into their proper element, Wheeler becomes a vastly different and more voluble person when he's on a trip (or recalling or anticipating a trip). This is Tony No 2." The article continues in this tone.
What did they think of it? For the first time in the interview, Wheeler gets up to pour more coffee from the urn on the sideboard. “We thought that the guy – whose name escapes me at the moment – had almost sort of written his story before he met us.” He comes back with the coffee, and shrugs. “It was okay, but it didn’t break any new ground. It didn’t tell me anything new, really.”
So if it didn’t say anything new about Wheeler, does he agree with Friend’s analysis of Tony 1 and Tony 2? “What did he say? I forget.” I read out the lines. “People in the office have commented about that,” he says, referring to the line where nobody greeted him as he gave the journalist a tour of his own company. “It was a bunch of things. It was just one of those days when I didn’t bump into anyone.” Then he goes off on a tangent.
“Although I’ve got to say, if I look at one of the things that are sad about as the business grows bigger and larger, it’s that once upon a time, you knew everybody in the business.” He talks about everyone going down to the pub for lunch together in the early days, and how as the company grew, he simply didn’t know who worked for him any longer. “That’s a sad element about it, that a business that you did once have that real grip of, that you don’t any more.”
He doesn’t address the fact that it was highly likely all his employees knew who he was, which doesn’t explain why none of them apparently acknowledged his presence.
In 2007, the Wheelers sold 75 per cent of the company to the BBC. "It was time to make a change. We're not getting younger." They have two children, Tashi (28) and Kieran (26), but although both have worked for the company, neither was interested in taking it over. Since then, Wheeler has travelled more than ever. The couple also focus a lot on their Lonely PlanetFoundation, which commits 5 per cent of annual profits to their international charity partners.
WITH 500 TITLESnow in print that appear to cover every part of the world, including a guide to Antarctica these days, you're unlikely to find any politically incorrect observations such as in Across Asia on the Cheap. Does Wheeler regret the fact that as the business grew, the books became ever more efficient, but dull?
"Yeah, I regret it, but it's an inevitable sort of thing. It's driven by a template, there's no question of it. We have a manual on how to write a Lonely Planetguide, and we spend a lot of time working through it with our writers. Once upon a time, we'd just say, go and write the book."
Australia is their base, and they live in Melbourne, “but actually I’ve got a house in London as well. So I like to say that I spend half the year in Melbourne, half the year in London and the other half of the year everywhere else”. This year alone, he has spent two months in Laos and Alaska making television programmes; been on a three-week bike ride through Tanzania and Malawi; visited Costa Rica and the Faroe Islands; popped over to their London base; is now in Ireland; due in Italy in two days, and “there’s still several weeks left in the year”.
What does he do to relax? There is a long pause. “Gosh.” He tries to think of things he does that are not travel-related, and fails. “Scuba-diving,” he offers, “that’s a great thing to do when travelling,” before admitting that “most of the things I’m interested in are connected with travel, I guess.”
It’s clear that for Wheeler, his work became his life, and continues to be his life. “I do keep track of the countries I’ve been to,” he admits happily. “Maureen hates me for doing that. She thinks it’s a real Boy’s Own thing, list-ticking and so on. I’m up to 140-something countries. You can’t just go to the airport lounge, as far as I’m concerned. You have to really visit the place.”
Where in the world is he still curious to see? “Yemen,” he answers. “If only I had more time, I could fit that one in too. But let’s face it, if there was any place I really, really wanted to go, I could go there tomorrow, couldn’t I?” It’s a rhetorical question. “I’m going to Italy the day after tomorrow to a conference, but I don’t have to go, I could easily phone them up and say I’m ill, and go to Yemen instead.”
TONY WHEELER
BORN1946, England.
FAMILYBased in Australia since 1973. Married to Maureen. Children Tashi (28) and Kieran (26).
FAMOUS FORCo-founding Lonely Planetwith Maureen; a company specialising in guidebooks, 500 of which are usually in print at any one time, employing 300 writers worldwide. Their first title, Across Asia on the Cheap, was written by Tony Wheeler and self-published. The 100th millionth copy was sold in October, not including photocopied bootleg copies widely available in South-East Asia. Their best-selling book is currently Australia. Sold 75 per cent of the company to the BBC in 2007.
