London - Back in the 60s, if you wanted to go on holiday, you had a limited choice. For the traditionalists, it was generally France or Spain. For those with a more adventurous streak, several thousand pounds would get you a seat on a plane to the USA. This changed during the early 70s. India became the spiritual home of free love, and suddenly, hippies everywhere were extolling the virtues of travel.

It was this trend which inspired Tony Wheeler and his new wife, Maureen, to set off on the trip of a lifetime in 1972. A trip which would provide the inspiration for their publishing company Lonely Planet.

“We didn’t go out there and think ‘hey, there’s a gap in the market, let’s fill that gap’. It was just that people wanted that information and we had it, so we thought, why don’t we provide it?”

Their first book, Across Asia on the Cheap, was written from notes they had accrued during their journey. The book was less self-financed than not really financed at all: the couple wrote their own copy, drew their own maps, and when initial inquiries into prospective publishers didn’t spark much interest, decided to publish it themselves.

The pair managed to persuade an acquaintance who happened to have a printing press at his disposal to print 1,500 copies of the book. Or at least, the pages of 1,500 copies - they did the folding and stapling themselves.

Looking back at it, Wheeler says the idea for Lonely Planet came about just at the right moment. A generation of young people were busy rejecting their parents’ job-for-life mentality and beginning to take travel seriously. “It wasn’t just a question of Spain or France or Italy any more, people were going to Morocco and then on to Africa and Turkey and beyond that.

“People were travelling in a more easygoing manner - they thought, ‘I’m going to keep travelling until my money runs out’. It wasn’t a question of going off on a three-week holiday any more.”

The first book sold out of its first 1,500 copies within 10 days, and the Wheelers ordered a reprint - which sold out soon after. It was when the pair were planning their third reprint, this time of 3,500 copies, that the idea occurred to them that they could make a living out of this.

While the business has now moved from the couple’s living room to a multi-million pound, global business with 500 titles and the same number of staff; it has always managed to retain its grass-roots image. Just as that first book did, Lonely Planet’s titles continue to cover exotic, niche destinations other publishers have never heard of, let alone thought there would be a market for. How have they managed to go global but keep that independent feel?

“We started off as a tiny little publishing house and our feeling was, the big publishing houses are doing the big places, and we haven’t got the muscle, money or expertise to compete with them. All we can do is the things they’re not doing,” says Wheeler.

As with much of the travel industry, 9/11 rocked Lonely Planet to its very foundations. “It was the end of the go-go years,” says Wheeler.

“We needed to slow things down anyway - look at budgeting and behave more sensibly. But suddenly, it wasn’t a question of doing it gradually any more.”

By September 12, the company decided to halt the production of guides to areas they felt would see a slowdown in tourism, as well as implementing an extended leave without pay programme for staff which they hoped would keep redundancies down.

In 2007, the Wheelers sold a reported 75% of their stake in the company to BBC Worldwide. The move provoked uproar from competitors - including Time Out publisher Tony Elliot, who wrote an impassioned letter to the Office of Fair Trading, which said the merger would create ‘an inexhaustible fund of factual, technical and editorial information and expertise quite beyond the resources of any privately funded organisation such as Time Out’.

Does Wheeler think Elliot’s outrage was justified?

“Five or 10 years ago, when Penguin bought Rough Guides, I thought, ‘oh shit’. Suddenly they were part of an organisation a hundred times bigger than us. They started giving away a free Penguin novel when you bought a Rough Guide - we couldn’t compete with that! It was very unfair. And that’s what Tony Elliot is saying. But that’s competition. It’s unfair.”

It may be this competitive streak which has helped the ostensibly friendly, publishing-house-next-door imprint to survive through two global recessions, the bursting of the dotcom bubble, and a terrorist incident which created the biggest ever threat to the travel industry.

So what is Wheeler’s advice to entrepreneurs struggling with the effects of the credit crunch?

Passion. “If you’re doing it because it’s going to make money, you’re doomed. Your belief in the business is the first thing, and making money should just be a kind of sideline.

“Make sure you are doing what you enjoy. Then, if it falls on its face, at least you had fun.”

Source: www.startups.co.uk