Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder on Friday the 18th of August.

50 years ago today, Tony and Maureen Wheeler were in their kitchen, I'm assuming, in Sydney, Australia,

stapling together or preparing the final draft of across Asia

on the cheap, initial print run of 1,500 copies of what would become the first book in the

Lonely Planet Guidebook series. Clearly, a lot has happened since then and an awful lot has changed just in the past three

years which is affecting the guidebook industry. So to find out more, I'm joined by Tom Hall. Tom,

you have been with Lonely Planet for how many years now? 24. Okay, so pretty much half of its existence.

What's your first title and what's your current title? I think my first title was

envelope stuffer, which I very much enjoyed and I now have the very American title of Vice President.

Which is very good. We all would love to be a vice president.

Clearly the guidebook industry, I would suggest, had a worse pandemic experience than pretty

much any other part of any industry, let alone the

travel industry on its own. If people couldn't travel, they didn't need guidebooks, although I hope

some people were still buying them to travel vicariously or indeed plan their next trip.

We've now emerged from that and Lonely Planet is now part of a bigger

organisation called Red Ventures. What ultimately does that mean for loyal Lonely Planet fans or

do people who are considering buying guidebooks, perhaps, for the first time.

The first thing that I'd say is, you're definitely correct to say that the pandemic was a tough time for

everyone in travel and for people in travel publishing. If you're in the middle of a situation,

you can't see the other

end of it. That's a difficult one. We are in the business of making books. That takes time. You

don't just have that research process. You have to get them printed. You have to get them shipped.

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