The Lonely Planet Story

Every traveler loves Lonely Planet. Their guide books become a-must-have-item for traveler, especially for backpackers, although according to Tony Wheeler, the founder of Lonely Planet, their traveling books actually not designed just for backpackers but also for businessman, family trip and all kinds of travelers. Still, it seems that backpackers love them most.

Yep, this book is a story about Lonely Planet, the biggest, the most successful and the most lovable traveling guidance book on earth. They have offices in 3 continents with 400 employees, 250 writers, more than 600 books published in the market and yearly sales reach more than 6 millions books. A great business? Absolutely. It's all started in 1972, Tony and Maureen Wheeler started their journey to travel around the world within one year. Returned back from their journey, they got a lot of questions about it. How could they go there? Where to stay? That's the reason behind the establishment of this company.

This book tells in detail about the Lonely Planet, their struggle from writing the books, printing them, publishing them, it all needed a lot of hard works. If people said that it's so enjoyable to get money from their hobbies, in fact it's not as beautiful as we thought. Once you decide to make this hobby as your way to earn a living, you start to deal with deadline, places to visit, report to prepare,no time for fun. All must be done in accordance with planning, schedule, and stuff like that.

They not only experienced the good times, there's also bad times, e.g. 9/11 attack, SARS, Bali bombing, Iraq invasion, those things turned the traveling business down. The selling of traveling books dropped drastically. Finally they had to lay off their Lonely Planet's employees.

Other interesting thing that people curious is where the name 'Lonely Planet' derives from. It turned out that this name came from a wrong song lyric from "Space captain" by Matthew Moore sung by Joe Cooker in classic movie "Mad Dogs and Englishman". Tony sang it 'once while traveling across the sky, this lonely planet caught my eye', Maureen corrected, "it's not lonely planet, it's lovely planet."

Since the name Lonely Planet sounded much better, finally they used it as their company's name and sure it's the right choice. I love the name 'Lonely Planet',it sounds unique.

This book already translated into bahasa Indonesia by Penerbit B-First on March 2009.

A truly inspiring book. Love it.