Lonely Planet's name came from a misheard song lyric
A song by Matthew Moore sings of a lovely planet, but the founders heard it as a lonely planet. The mistake stuck, and it became the name of perhaps the best-known guidebook brand in the world. The very first book was a stapled 94-page booklet the couple wrote in their own home.
In 1972 Maureen and Tony Wheeler, a married couple, travelled overland from Europe through Asia to Australia, tracing the route of an old Oxford and Cambridge expedition. Their notes became Across Asia on the Cheap, published in 1973 with pale blue cardboard covers. The series spread across Asia, with an India guide in 1981, and then the rest of the world, carried partly by writers like Geoff Crowther, whose habit of sprinkling his own opinions through the text became part of the appeal.
Success was lavish. By 1999 the company had sold 30 million guides, authors shared in the profits, and some arrived at parties at the Melbourne office in limousines. Its influence on where travellers went became so strong that in 2010 it was blamed for the crowded backpacker circuit around Southeast Asia known as the Banana Pancake Trail.
Selling up proved costly for the buyer. The BBC's commercial arm took a 75 percent stake in 2007 and bought out the rest in 2011, only to sell the whole business in 2013 to Brad Kelley's NC2 Media at a loss of nearly 80 million pounds. It changed hands again in 2020, going to Red Ventures, and in 2024 pulled out of the Chinese market.
The online forum had a poetic name. The Thorn Tree, launched in 1996, was named after an acacia at the Stanley Hotel in Nairobi that people had used as a message board since 1902. The forum went read-only in the pandemic and closed in 2021. Along the way the brand faced controversy, from calls to boycott its Myanmar guide to a video wrongly crediting Chinese builders with the Philippines' Banaue rice terraces.
Source: Lonely Planet
