Tony Wheeler on What’s Next for Burma Travel

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 10.17.07 | 9:45 AM ET

Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler writes in the Guardian that his travel contacts within Burma are reeling from the recent protests and the ensuing crackdown. However, he adds, boycotts and isolation are not the best response to recent events; he continues to be an advocate for travel to the country.

He writes:

Over the three decades since my first visit, tourism has grown from 20,000 tourists a year to more than 100,000. Compared to neighbouring Thailand, now approaching 10 million annual visitors, it’s a drop in the bucket. Even Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge were still kidnapping and killing visitors when I first went there in 1992, has more than a million tourists, 10 times as many as Burma. With a decent, respectable government Burma could easily be just as important a destination. Until then, cutting the country off from the rest of the world isn’t going to help.

Lonely Planet has put out a travel guide to Burma, but now that BBC Worldwide has bought the company, whether it will continue to be published—it’s controversial in some quarters—remains to be seen. Wheeler, however, remains optimistic.

“Well editorial independence, telling the truth, providing honest and accurate news and information has always been what the world has expected from the BBC,” he writes. “I do not believe it will change now.”

Another legendary travel guide founder, Arthur Frommer, has an opposite view of traveling to Burma.