BBC Worldwide Buys Lonely Planet

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 10.01.07 | 11:33 AM ET

Big news in the travel publishing world: BBC Worldwide has purchased indie guidebook publisher Lonely Planet. Founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler will retain a 25 percent stake in the company they founded more than three decades ago. Reuters puts the price of the deal at $203 million. Tony Wheeler said he believes the sale will help Lonely Planet stay competitive while allowing the publisher to remain true to its original values. While he and Maureen will now have more time to travel, it wasn’t easy for them to “sell out,” he said. In an audio interview, he told Australia’s ABC, “It’s been 34 years, it’s been our entire working life together…It’s been a long road…although we’re convinced it’s the right thing for the business…it’s a difficult thing to do.” I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.

Back in 2005, I blogged about a profile of the Wheelers in the New Yorker. Here’s a snippet of my thoughts—the first line refers to a ruckus some people were making over the revelation that the Wheelers fly business class:

I myself wasn’t moved as much by those details in the New Yorker story—if the Wheelers want to fly business class and live it up in expensive hotels, that’s fine by me—as I was by the way the Wheelers feel about the changes that have occurred at Lonely Planet since they created it 30 years ago. As Tony put it in the New Yorker story: “Those vivid colors of the early books, once they get blended with so many other authors and editors and concerns about what the customer wants, they inevitably become gray and bland. It’s entropy, isn’t it?”

It’s hard not to read the story and come away feeling that something essential has been lost, especially for the Wheelers. It’s as if their child has grown up and they’ve lost all control and now they don’t quite know what to make of it all. They only know that they’re not entirely happy with the way things have turned out.

Given that, I imagine the Wheelers now feel a certain sense of relief.

For more on the deal, the Los Angeles Times has a slew of links.