BBC buys travel bible Lonely Planet

BBC buys travel bible Lonely Planet

Sydney (dpa) - A majority stake in Australian travel guide publishing company Lonely Planet has been acquired by the commercial arm of the government-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for an undisclosed sum, news reports said Monday.

The privately held business was founded in 1972 by Melbourne couple Tony and Maureen Wheeler.

They told national broadcaster ABC that selling a 75 per cent stake to the BBC would finance expansion and the building of the Lonely Planet brand around the world. They will retain 25 per cent of the company.

"We realized we're obviously no longer just a book publisher," Tony Wheeler said. "As far as the reality of the business is, a lot of it is now digital - our website and other things we do, from photo libraries to TV production. The value of the brand, the value of Lonely Planet is really eventually going to be much more on that side of it."

Lonely Planet publishes about 500 titles. As well as its popular budget travel guides, it puts out specialist travel guides and phrase books. Recently the company began film production through Lonely Planet Television.

"Lonely Planet is a highly respected international brand and a global leader in the provision of travel information," BBC Worldwide chief executive John Smith said in a statement.

"This deal fits well with our strategy to create one of the world's leading content businesses, to grow our portfolio of content brands online and to increase our operations in Australia and America."

Bangkok Post

Does this mean the endless list of backpacker hotels will be replaced by pages full of cities towns and villages around the globe that lack proper hotels, proper beer, proper food, proper manners and cannot speak correctly?
:sad:


https://teakdoor.com/Gallery/albums/u...s/10383/mt.jpg

Well hopefully they might go a bit more upmarket, lonely planet would love where I am staying at the moment, used toilet paper strewed all over the ladies bathroom floor, real class, well the prices suggest that, the worker cleared it all up as I was waiting for my camera flash to charge, would have made a lovely picture.

wow , you've come a long way baby !!!

first copy I saw of SE ASIA on a Shoe String

came off one of these ...................

https://teakdoor.com/images/smilies1/You_Rock_Emoticon.gif
cns2.uni.edu

I'm glad I don't pay my TV licence - £100 a year to watch repeats of Star Trek while they waste money on this shite.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mid

wow , you've come a long way baby !!!

first copy I saw of SE ASIA on a Shoe String

came off one of these ...................

https://teakdoor.com/images/smilies1/You_Rock_Emoticon.gif
cns2.uni.edu

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Any idea where I can get one of those old hand-crank printers from in Bangkok?

Lonely Planet publications are good.

It's the Rough Guide series which are crap and the Editor is an idiot.

If BBC play their cards right then it is a good move

The problem with a guide book is it's always someone elses opinion. I must admit when i've travelled i've always taken one with me but if i'd always followed the author's advice i'd have missed some great places! Just my opinion. Another thing, will being owned by the BBC lose LP some of it's credibility (if it had any) amongst younger bacpackers?

date: 2 October 2007
embargo: For immediate release
TUC urges BBC Worldwide to withdraw Lonely Planet guide to Burma

BBC Worldwide should stop encouraging tourists to visit Burma and indirectly funding its repressive military regime, the TUC said today (Tuesday).
Following the announcement that BBC Worldwide has acquired the travel information group Lonely Planet, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber has written to John Smith, its Chief Executive, urging him to sign up to the campaign for a boycott of all economic links with Burma.
Despite sustained pressure from the Burma Campaign UK and the international trade union movement, Lonely Planet continues to publish its guide to Burma. Other travel publishers such as Rough Guide are refusing to publish a book on Burma so long as the military regime remains in power and Aung San Suu Kyi - leader of the democratically elected National League for Democracy - asks tourists not to visit.
TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: 'The people that know the country the best - its trade unions and the Burmese democracy movement - want the world's tourists to stay away from Burma. The Lonely Planet book currently suggests that Burma is a perfectly acceptable holiday destination. But people would be less likely to visit the country if there were no guidebook to help them decide where to go. The BBC should stop promoting holidays to Burma and withdraw the Lonely Planet book immediately.'
The TUC and a number of other organisations including the Burma Campaign UK and Amnesty International are organising a demonstration in central London this Saturday. Demonstrators will gather outside Tate Britain in Millbank, then march to Trafalgar Square for a rally at 1pm.
The TUC is calling for an immediate end to the repression in Burma, an end to the use of forced and child labour (which has been used to develop much of the country's tourist facilities), an economic boycott of the country, and for the UN to mobilise diplomatic pressure from around the world.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
- The text of the letter to John Smith appears below:
Lonely Planet and Holidays in Burma
I have recently seen the news reports about BBC Worldwide's acquisition of Lonely Planet. I have also, of course, seen the dreadful news on the BBC and elsewhere about the violent response of the Burmese military junta against the peaceful protests of the people.
For some years, Lonely Planet has stood out against world opinion - including the views of the leaders of the three main political parties in the UK as expressed during the last General Election campaign - in promoting holidays in Burma.
The people of Burma (including our brothers and sisters in the Federation of Trade Unions of Burma, the FTUB) have called upon the rest of the world to boycott the economic links with the country which only serve to perpetuate the military dictatorship. The international trade union movement report 'Doing Business In or With Burma' (http://www.icftu.org/www/PDF/Burma-I...rt-January.pdf) sets out quite clearly the impact of such vacations. Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese democracy movement have asked tourists not to visit Burma because it helps fund the regime and gives it legitimacy. Forced and child labour was used to develop many tourist facilities.
We would therefore urge you to ensure that Lonely Planet desists from promoting holidays in Burma. I would be grateful for your views on this matter.
Yours sincerely
Brendan Barber
TUC General Secretary
Contacts:
Media enquiries: Elly Brenchley T: 020 7467 1337; M: 07900 910624;
E: [email protected]
Liz Chinchen T: 020 7467 1248; M: 07778 158175; E: [email protected]
Press release (600 words) issued 2 Oct 2007

What Lonely Planet is the BBC on?
Andrew Gilligan
16 Nov 2013

£100m loss on travel book deal as corporation’s executives ride the gravy train

https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2013/11/2529.jpg
The market in printed guidebooks collapsed as BBC paid £90 million for the Lonely Planet company in 2007
Photo: ALAMY

Tony and Maureen Wheeler, founders of the Lonely Planet travel books, guided an entire generation of backpackers to the cheapest banana pancakes in Chiang Mai.

What a shame the people who bought the Wheelers’ publishing empire didn’t take quite the same care with the contents of their moneybelts.

Last week, almost unnoticed by the media, the BBC published its investigation into the extraordinary scandal that was its purchase of Lonely Planet.

The Wheelers might have come back from their first overland trip, in 1973, with only 27 Australian cents in their pockets — but in 2007 the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, paid £90 million for a controlling stake in their company, even as its young customers moved online and the market in printed guidebooks collapsed.

Normally, the BBC makes the content – programmes or web pages – and BBC Worldwide sells it overseas.

But this deal relied on Worldwide, or Lonely Planet, making content, then getting the rest of the BBC to use it, which it was never going to do (it already had travel programmes, and Lonely Planet is based in Melbourne).

By 2011, as the investigation admitted, it was clear that BBC Worldwide had got “carried away” and that Lonely Planet had no hope of meeting its “highly optimistic” business forecasts. But that year, astonishingly, the BBC paid the Wheelers a further £42 million for their remaining 25 per cent stake — at “the original acquisition price” agreed in 2007, the investigation admits, “despite the significant under performance of the business”.

With a further £20 million invested in developing Lonely Planet, that made a total spend of £152 million.

In March this year, the BBC sold Lonely Planet for just £51.5 million, a £100 million loss. The person responsible for the deal left in December with an £800,000 pay-off. Why the corporation ever needed to own an Australian guidebook publisher in the first place has yet to be explained.

Last week, Lord Patten of Barnes, the BBC’s chairman, gave an interview to the New Statesman, protesting that the broadcaster’s recent severance pay scandal, when dozens of departing senior managers got a total of £6.8 million more than they were entitled to, was, though wrong, “not the most outrageous example I can think of mortal sin”.

To some, this sounded complacent – but it was, in one sense, true.

Compared with Lonely Planet and the slightly smaller but better-known fiasco of the “digital media initiative”, which wasted £98 million, mere single millions are small beer. Those two mistakes alone cost as much as the entire annual editorial budgets of five national newspapers put together.

The digital media initiative was supposed to turn the BBC “tapeless,” but never worked properly and has now been scrapped.

On the day Baroness Thatcher died, BBC News couldn’t show archive footage until the boring old tapes, now banished to a distant suburb, had been brought in on the Tube by a member of staff.

The person responsible for the disaster was given a £140,000 bonus. Last week, too, it emerged that Lucy Adams, the corporation’s head of human resources, is having her libel action against the National Union of Journalists paid for by the BBC (she denies running a “dirty tricks” campaign against her own staff).

Miss Adams, who presided over many of the excessive pay-offs, is leaving after denying to Parliament all knowledge of an email about the payouts. She later admitted that she helped to write it.

Lord Patten protested that some newspapers had a “commercial” and “ideological” agenda in which the BBC got “bashed more than President Assad”.

No one at the BBC ever came close to Assad’s crimes, of course. But it is clear that, over the past few years, something has gone badly wrong at the top of the corporation.

There were cheers in the BBC newsroom when Miss Adams announced her departure. Just as in any Arab dictatorship, the BBC’s rulers have become a self-rewarding elite, a deadweight on their little broadcasting nation, who make their citizens — in this case, the corporation’s generally hard-working, underpaid staff — feel angry and ashamed.

As of April, despite £150 million worth of senior management pay-offs, there were still 437 of them, by the way — senior managers, that is; not unlike the Saudi royal family in extent, if not quite in riches.

Two hundred and forty-five — a number not including programme-makers, performers or journalists — make more than £100,000 a year. The Metropolitan Police, with almost treble the staff, only has 53. There is of course no comparison between the two organisations. How can protecting London from terrorists, murderers and rapists possibly compare with the onerous demands of supervising Cash In The Attic?

And though there is undeniably an ideological bias to the criticism, the corporation should be worried that it is starting to come from beyond the usual Right-wing suspects: from liberal newspaper columnists and, last week, from Roger Mosey, its own former head of news.

He suggested sharing the licence fee with other media to promote pluralism — an idea originally raised under Labour, then suggested again by Grant Shapps, the Tory party chairman, in The Sunday Telegraph three weeks ago.

The BBC’s “editorial voice”, argued Mr Mosey, “speaks too much as one to the exclusion of others. The BBC Trust speaks the language of diversity, but in its edicts it promotes conformity, whether it’s about an agreed approach to the science of climate change, “correct” terminology in the Middle East or the way a documentary about benefits should be “constructed”.

The “homogeneity” of the BBC’s news output, he said, was “intensified by regulation that sees there being 'right’ and 'wrong’ answers”.

For Mr Shapps and others on the Right, this was exemplified by the BBC’s attempt to disprove a Sunday Telegraph story about the large number of EU migrants without jobs — unfairly and inaccurately, in the newspaper’s view.

Some of what Mr Shapps said, of course, was the pre-election intimidation that all governments practise on the BBC. But there is more to it than that. Across the rest of the media, old advertising-based business models are crumbling. They can no longer support the plural, diverse media that we need.

The BBC, with its guaranteed tax-based funding, is ever more dominant. If it cannot become more pluralistic, and speak with a diversity of voices, then pluralism and diversity will have to be secured in other ways.

The question now is whether the opinion-former rebellion spreads to the TV-watching masses. In the end, that will depend on whether the BBC produces good enough programmes.

There is ominous evidence that the BBC’s lack of pluralism and layers of management are, indeed, stifling some of its output.

Perhaps the best external indicator of the BBC’s creativity and quality is how it does in the main broadcasting awards. The Sunday Telegraph has tallied the past five years’ worth of Bafta and Royal Television Society (RTS) and Sony radio winners — and the results are sometimes troubling. In many areas the BBC, it turns out, does not do quite as well as it should, given its utterly dominant position in broadcasting.

In the five sets of Bafta television awards since 2009, a total of 113 competitive domestic awards have been made. The BBC has won 62 of them, or just over half — not too bad, but it should probably have done better, given its vast disparity in resources over all its rivals.

It broadly dominates, as it always has, in comedy and does well, too, in entertainment. In drama, most years, it is matched or beaten by the commercial sector. Many of the most successful dramas of the past few years — such as Broadchurch and Downton Abbey — have been on ITV.

In radio, the BBC has won 64 per cent of the Sony gold awards over the past four years — again perhaps a little low, given that almost all “quality” radio in Britain is made by the Beeb. In the RTS television awards, it won 61 per cent. But the BBC’s most glaring weakness is in its journalism.

Over the past five years, in the RTS’s separate TV journalism awards, it has won just 39 per cent of the gongs, astonishingly low given that the BBC represents almost four-fifths of all TV news consumption in the UK.

At Bafta, the largest news organisation on the planet hasn’t won a single award for news coverage since 2006, and has only won it twice in the 12 years since the award was created.

It is, of course, news which suffers most from managerial interference, editorial timidity, and corporate centralism. And it is, of course, news, of all the BBC’s programmes, which politicians and other opinion-formers watch most.

The new regime under director-general Lord Hall has promised change.

But the number of managers is only coming down from 437 to a slimline 415 — by 2015. The BBC’s news bulletins, as the EU report suggests, show no sign of becoming less monotone.

The corporation may have to do more than that if it is to secure its future.

telegraph.co.uk

10/20 years ago the Lonely Planet was a must for all travellers, i even bought a few myself!

The tinternet has killed it off in recent years!

Another waste of licence fee payers money!

The BBC.... can i have a job and get paid of 100,000's for not relocating .

CCC

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chittychangchang

10/20 years ago the Lonely Planet was a must for all travellers, i even bought a few myself!

The tinternet has killed it off in recent years!

Another waste of licence fee payers money!

The BBC.... can i have a job and get paid of 100,000's for not relocating .

CCC

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Lonely Planet books might be obsolete but the information it once presented is available online, and people like tripadvisor have shown how to leverage it into an effective business model.

Why the BBC didn't just do this itself, I have no idea.

How many frigging travel shows do they fund that are basically little more than a paid holiday for some C-list "celeb" nonentity.

^

I don't think The Books are obsolete at all, I see stinkies using them all the time combined with on line info.

The BBC also bought the Friends reunited website for 150 M GBP in 2005 ......and sold it for 25M GBP four years later.


BBC NEWS | Business | ITV in £25m Friends Reunited sale

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Originally Posted by Fluke

The BBC also bought the Friends reunited website for 150 M GBP in 2005 ......and sold it for 25M GBP four years later.


BBC NEWS | Business | ITV in £25m Friends Reunited sale

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That was ITV, not the BBC.


ITV in £25m Friends Reunited sale
ITV has sold Friends Reunited for £25m, despite having agreed to pay a total of £175m for it in 2005.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Neverna

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fluke

The BBC also bought the Friends reunited website for 150 M GBP in 2005 ......and sold it for 25M GBP four years later.


BBC NEWS | Business | ITV in £25m Friends Reunited sale

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That was ITV, not the BBC.


ITV in £25m Friends Reunited sale
ITV has sold Friends Reunited for £25m, despite having agreed to pay a total of £175m for it in 2005.

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Jeeezzz , no need to be pedantic !!!!!!