Tony and Maureen Wheeler set the group up in the
early 1970s after travelling across Asia and publishing
a book on it entitled Across Asia on the Cheap.
This success was followed up by further travelling
guides and they now produce around 500 titles that are
used worldwide by fellow travelers and backpackers.
Today,
Lonely Planet operates out of London, Sydney and
Oakland with over 300 on-the-road journalists and
500 employees. Their passion for their work and
travelling was recognized in 2005 when they received
the Eric A Friedheim Travel Journalism Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Society of American Travel
Writers Foundation and American University's School
of Communication.
BBC
Worldwide was set up a little over 10 years ago
in 1995 when it took over from BBC Entertainment
which had previously run the commercial aspects
of the BBC. Worldwide is largely responsible for
a wide range of commercial activities that include
television and film production, foreign BBC channels
(e.g. BBC America), book and magazine publishing,
DVD releases, audio productions, education and training
materials, exhibitions, live events and general
media monitoring.
BBC
Worldwide has been coming under intense criticism
from rival media companies claiming that BBC Worldwide
gained a significant advantage due to their association
with the BBC. As a result, BBC Worldwide reviewed
their commercial activities in 2004 and decided
to refocus their core strategies, one of them being
to focus more on the travel industry.
Purchasing
new media outlets has not been the only activity
since the review in 2004 as the BBC has relinquished
BBC Books, selling it on to publishers Random House
last year, and also selling eve magazine
to the Haymarket Group in 2005. The BBC claim that
these did not fit in with the new core strategies
they had devised.
The Wheeler’s
still own 25% of the business and say that they
made decision to sell to the BBC as they believed
that the BBC would be able to provide a platform
that would help take Lonely Plant to the next level
whilst also still holding the business’s values
and visions.
Lonely Planet users
will now benefit from access to a range of BBC travelling
content such as Michael Palin’s New Europe
This
article was brought to you by Thomas Ross, a web
consultant for Costa
Rica News.
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