The Wild Story of the Lonely Planet: From a Honeymoon Trip to a $200 Million Empire

No location pins this week (well, technically two- The Atlanta Hotel, where we filmed with Joe: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BRPMFpEnmKBQp4ZQ9 …and Karim Roti Mataba, at the end, which is a cool story but I think the food was probably better back in 1982. https://maps.app.goo.gl/19ZfVosUemGLoSuy5 )

However I do have a couple notes I want to make sure we work in. First- thanks so much to Gary Butler, the Roaming Cook, for filming for us in the UK. Amazingly fortuitous that he was available and in London at the same time this was scheduled, and generous of his time and experience in making that end of the interview look and sound great.

2nd- both of these interviews were wildly fascinating and for the final edit, we only used a small fraction of the two conversations. Please consider joining our Patreon- it's a huge help to us, and we'll be posting both interviews raw and unedited on Patreon within the next day or so. They're both interesting and worth a watch even without editing.

And last but absolutely not least- I'm devastated that my planned post-credits ending for this video got cut. I knew it would happen, but it got copyright-flagged. However I would strongly, strongly suggest you search for the Anthony Bourdain Thailand video from Parts Unknown, in 2014. Start at around the 17:15 mark. Please watch it (after you've watched this video). I've re-watched that clip like a dozen times since we taped this, and laugh each time.

So So SO awesome! You've out-done yourselves once again!!

I bought my first Lonely Planet guide to Thailand back in 1988 when I was a kid still, and it was a life saver, accurate to a fault, since then its still the gold standard.

So glad you did this. Opened many memories . Such a contrast to all the fear people seem to have about meeting 'foreigners '

While Lonely Planet were wonderful books they had competition. When I travelled (mainly) overland from Bali to Europe in early 1975 I was carrying a copy of All-Asia Guide from Far Eastern Economic Review. My very-tattered 1974 copy is marked as the Eighth Edition. While it was aimed at the business traveller it would include a few $1 hotel options in every major city including Bangkok and Jakarta.
In my copy as a weight saving, I cut out the countries and regions that I was skipping. It is well read and had a hard life.
In addition, every tourist centre had one cafe or hostel where everyone gathered and shared stories. Nobody was travelling fast. I took four months from Singapore to England and I was probably travelling faster than many.
An other notable guide on my bookshelf is the Overland Guide to India "A practical guide to getting there / cheaply, happily and unhassled". It was published 1971 in Canada. An sample for arriving in Kabul by bus: "Go with a boy from Hotel Mustafa if you can; it is really a groove and a bargain at 40 Afghanis per night, considering what you get. Any of the other cheap hotels are acceptable as well except the Hotel Olfat which must be avoided, even if they let you stay for free".
I suspect that there were plenty of other handouts and newsprint compilations in other languages. What the Wheelers did was concentrate on the budget market in a comprehensive way that nobody else managed to do.

I traveled throughout Japan in the Golden Week before Smartphone era, using that big bulky Lonely Planet guide book!! Worth every Baht!! (I think I bought that book in Thailand)

According to this video, I got into backpacking just when it took off big time: 1988. Used Lonely Planet all the way through 9 Asian countries, including Thailand. Without it, we wouldn't have known where to go, or how to do anything.

So, is Lonely Planet responsible for over tourism and decay of environment? 😅

Walker Kevin Martinez Karen Hernandez Shirley

When are you off to Uzbekistan ?

OH WOW, yeah, I was working at a big independent music store in 1994-ish, and the store's owner was a tech guy and he started a small internet provider business on the 2nd floor of the store. I had sort-of put myself in charge of the "International" section in the store because I loved Celtic music and was interested in music from other cultures even though I didn't know much about much of it, and no one else who worked there had any interest at all in that kind of stuff so the section was full of stuff no one knew anything about and barely any product sold.

After a couple of months the managers saw that I was taking care of the stock there and leading customers to it if our conversations took us to artists they liked who had a link in some way to certain "international" artists I knew about (a very small list to be sure, but it was enough that the person in charge of ordering stock had noticed more was moving than usual) and they officially put me in charge of the section. I was super excited because they gave me permission to open CDs to listen to them (this was a HUGE no-no and digital streaming wasn't a thing yet) which helped me sell even more, and I started using the internet connection upstairs, when the store wasn't busy, to research the artists I was falling in love with so I knew what other titles to ask to have ordered in, which also led me to new artists we weren't stocking but I knew we should be stocking, and my research often led me to a webpage called "The Rough Guide to Music" … which turned out to be an offshoot of something called a travel guide for backpackers (I had no idea such things existed)…

… fast forward to 1996 and I was hired at Air Canada. I would go looking for a Rough Guide for whichever trip was going to take, and at some point early on there wasn't one for whatever country I was going to go to… but there was a Lonely Planet guide. And while I loved the Rough Guides, I was immediately hooked on the Lonely Planet guides.

Food was a huge part of my trips, and the places I visited have shaped the food I've cooked ever since (I'm now 51).

Weird ramble-y story, for a 3-sentence "yeah! Lonely Planet shaped me!" comment, but Lonely Planet was so tied up in my earliest experiences of the internet, and my love of music and my trajectory as in the kitchen, and my excitement at getting a Good Job that was going to enable me to do shoestring budget trips which was going to feed ALL of my interests…

… so yeah, Lonely Planet shaped me. ♥

44:45 – I devoured each and every travel guide I bought. I read sections over and over and over, planning the skeleton of my trip based on bus and train schedules in them (understanding that those easily could have changed since the book was published) for how I might move around the city/country, re-arranging my plans as I read through the book and found that x place I really wanted to go was only accessible by one train line that you had to catch from y or only had 2 trains per week, until I had figured out exactly what my main plan had to look like if I wanted to go HERE and HERE and HERE and do THIS that only happened/was open on this day of the week/had to arrive by this specific time.

My choice of places to stay was 100% via the guide, and I usually wrote an airmail letter ahead of the trip, sending travelers' cheques to secure the reservation (even for places that took credit cards, I didn't have one) after the hotel/guesthouse/hostel wrote me back by airmail to tell me they had reserved a room/bed for me for the nights requested and would hold the reservation until x date by which time they had to have received the deposit.

While I probably only ate at restaurants/food carts recommended in the guide 50% of the time, my hotel choice was often based on proximity to a restaurant described in the guide, and I made every attempt to eat there. And I'd have food places from the guide on my mind as I moved around day by day, deviating from that plan if I ran into something that lured me in, or if it was too busy, or of course if I was in a rush and had to grab something from whatever food cart was handy etc.

I'm French-English bilingual with a good foundation in Latin, and I found I was excellent at learning essential language ahead of a trip including if the alphabet was different, and then during the trip I could fill in more language acquisition as I spoke to people/studied my language book in down time. So I was rarely dissuaded by places that didn't have menus with English translations; I couldn't always read much of them but I usually had enough language to ask questions and understand something of the answers. And having made the effort to learn some language always made for amazing conversations with the restaurant owner/staff, and even sometimes locals at the table next to me, which resulted in additional recommendations of things to do and places to eat and just all-round amazing in-the-moment conversation.

All of it because of Lonely Planet guides, after my initial discovery of them as a resource. I travelled extensively for 7 years; at least 3 "big" trips per year (my definition of that was "somewhere not in North America, and preferably somewhere I'm unlikely to go when I'm older/no longer single because maybe it wouldn't be a place my partner wanted to go." And I don't do well with jet lag, so I always went somewhere for at least 7 days not counting air travel days, and preferrably went for 2 weeks… I worked double shifts at the reservations call centre in between trips, in order to triple my annual vacation time).