When You’ve Launched a Guidebook Company Celebrating Bohemian Charm, Should You Fly Business Class?

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 04.29.05 | 10:47 PM ET

We recently noted here that the New Yorker’s travel-themed issue included a profile of Lonely Planet and its founders, Tony and Maureen Wheeler. That article has turned out to be one of the most provocative stories about world travel and travel publishing in years, prompting conversations among travelers around the globe. Among the most discussed elements of the story: the fact that the Wheelers often fly business class and shacked up in a $400-a-night room on a recent visit to Oman; that when a child beggar in Oman gave Maureen the bird, she responded in kind; and Maureen’s remark that Lonely Planet doesn’t seem as real to her as it once did.

In Australia, the Wheelers have been explaining themselves in newspaper articles about the New Yorker profile. “I’m 55 years old, I’ve been working at Lonely Planet for 32 years, and we started flying business class maybe 10 years ago,” Maureen told The Age. “And I’m certainly not going to go back to economy unless I have to.” Regarding the anecdote about the child in Oman, Maureen told the newspaper: “(Oman) is a prosperous, developed country. This was not some poverty-stricken little beggar by the side of the road that I was being nasty to. It was one of those sorts of things… it took two minutes of my life and I’m going to go down in history as the woman who flips (her finger) to beggars.”

On Lonely Planet’s own Thorn Tree, travelers have posted comments defending the Wheelers. Wrote one person: “It is a bit of an industry in some places, and as reported, this kid gave the bird, so he gets it in return - good on Maureen.”

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. Countless other entrepreneurs have experienced the same feeling.

But of course, this is just one interpretation of the Wheelers’ experience. As Maureen told The Australian: “[New Yorker writer Tad Friend] told us that he thought it would be interesting to do the idea of how Lonely Planet has become a mainstream publication, which there is no doubt that it has. (But he) came to the story with it pretty much framed in his mind ... there are different interpretations of stories, and that is his.”

Tags: Australia & Pacific, Australia, News and Briefs