Where now for travel? Lonely Planet closures point to an uncertain future
Après 40 ans de succès, le célèbre guide de voyage fait grise mine.
La célèbre maison d'édition australienne Lonely Planet a contribué à transformer la manière dont les gens voyagent. C'est après avoir effectué un voyage épique à travers l'Asie que Tony et Maureen Wheeler ont l'idée de partager leurs expériences dans le premier guide Across Asia on the Cheap (À travers l'Asie pour pas cher) sorti en 1973. Depuis, la marque s'est étendue, proposant son expertise sous forme de magazines, d'émissions de télé, de livres audio et d'applications digitales. Mais des crises successives, dont maintenant le COVID-19, menacent à la fois l'avenir de ce titre historique et nos déplacements tout simplement.
Covid-19 has changed everything. In particular, it has changed everything about travel. As a Lonely Planet writer you learn fast that change is the only constant on the road. Still, no one was expecting the changes announced last week: that Lonely Planet is to close its Melbourne production facility and London
offices “almost entirely”, as well as its magazine and Trade and Reference division. The famous guidebooks will continue to be published through the company’s Dublin and Tennessee offices, but they will also face some job cuts.
2. As travel has outpaced the growth of the global economy for the last eight years, Lonely Planet has grown to become the world’s largest travel publisher, accounting for 31.5% of the global guidebook market. But with planes grounded, borders closed and people quarantined, where travel is headed next is anyone’s guess. “[It’s] a sad and difficult day for all of us in the Lonely Planet family,” wrote managing director of publishing, Piers Pickard.
THE END OF AN ERA
3. Certainly, the closure of Lonely Planet’s original headquarters in Melbourne is the end of an era. It was in Melbourne that co-founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler set up shop in 1973 after finishing their epic overland journey from London across Asia to Australia. They published an account of the journey in Across Asia on the Cheap, a stapled together volume featuring handdrawn maps and the nowfamous logo, designed by Tony. It sold 1,500 copies. Encouraged by its success, the Wheelers followed with guides to Nepal, Africa, New Zealand and New Guinea.
4. In 1977’s Africa on the Cheap, readers were advised to enjoy the “Bonadir weavers and old
mosques” of Mogadishu, while a guide to the Middle East offered advice on hitch-hiking to Baghdad from Syria. But, it was the success of the 1981 India guide that put Lonely Planet in the backpacks of many young traveller hungry for foreign experiences. “I remain proud of what Lonely Planet achieved,” says Tony Wheeler. “I’m always delighted when people say, ‘I wouldn’t have gone there if LP hadn’t have given me a push, showed me the way.’”
5. Ryan Ver Berkmoes, the veteran writer, onetime Lonely Planet publisher and author of 130 guidebooks, describes the company under Tony and Maureen, as “the friend you wanted next to you at the bar in the country you’d just landed in. Full of smart, savvy advice so you could start having a great trip. It was a rollicking and amazing place where you made friends worldwide.”
6. I signed up in 1999 to research Ethiopia and – as with millions of other travellers – subsequent Lonely Planet trips provided foundational life experiences. I healed a broken heart researching the desert landscapes of Namibia. Years in Italy taught me to appreciate life’s simple pleasures. When my mother died, my grieving father joined me in Sicily. A working-class man who never travelled for pleasure, he was consoled by the cavalcade of treasures we saw. Last week, a friend phoned from Benghazi, Libya, to enquire about my health and safety – a poignant irony given that he now lives in a city run by militias. 7. While part of the company’s mission was undoubtedly to introduce readers to offbeat or struggling nations, Ver Berkmoes emphasises the role Lonely Planet played in popularising travel in people’s lives. “It wasn’t just places like Libya, Burma (Myanmar) or Timor-Leste, there were few mainstream, widely available guidebooks for much of the planet” he explains. “Lonely Planet helped take the foreign out of foreign travel.”
THE FIRST TRAVEL BLOGS
8. The company has also been a technology pioneer. There was a Lonely Planet blog in 1994, five years before the word “blog” was coined. A website followed, along with CitySync guidebooks on PalmPilots. Most innovative of all was the online traveller’s forum, Thorn Tree, launched in
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