Lonely Planet
publisher of guidebooks and other media related to travel
Lonely Planet is a travel guide book publisher. Founded in Australia in 1973, the company has printed over 150 million books.
History
20th century
Lonely Planet was founded by married couple Maureen and Tony Wheeler. In 1972, they embarked on an overland trip through Europe and Asia to Australia following the route of the Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition.
The company name originates from the misheard "lovely planet" in a song written by Matthew Moore. Lonely Planet's first book, Across Asia on the Cheap, had 94 pages; it was written by the couple in their home. The original 1973 print run consisted of stapled booklets with pale blue cardboard covers.
Wheeler returned to Asia to write Across Asia on the Cheap: A Complete Guide to Making the Overland Trip, published in 1975.
The Lonely Planet guide book series initially expanded to cover other countries in Asia, with the India guide book in 1981, and expanded to the rest of the world later. Geoff Crowther was renowned for frequently inserting his opinions into the text of the guides he wrote.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Lonely Planet” as publisher of guidebooks and other media related to travel. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as publisher of guidebooks and other media related to travel. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17957. VIAF identifies the subject as 153768631. The Library of Congress control number is n95115325. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1972, 1975 and 1981.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Lonely Planet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.