By the time Tony co-founded Lonely Planet Publications in 1973, he already had the travel bug. And ever since, travel and discovery have been at the heart of his life and career.
I’ve recorded several podcasts, interviews, conversations recently.
At London Business School Maureen and I recorded Journeys, a conversation with Rajesh Chandy the Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Developing World at the Wheeler Institute. People seemed to enjoy it, someone suggested that we ‘looked like two teenagers our to start an exciting adventure,’ not business like at all.
With Tyrel Cameron Eskelson I talked on his Interlocutor podcast about my travel life, starting in Pakistan when I was a small child right up to travel in recent weeks and for the rest of 2025.
Back in April I made a short trek around countries in Europe which, for some reason, I’d never visited. OK some of them I had visited, but that was way back in the 1970s, before they even existed, back when two of them were constituent parts of Yugoslavia. That trip t...
The National Portrait Gallery in London (half way between Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square, right behind the National Gallery) is one of my favourite London museums or galleries and each year the BP Portrait Award – ‘the most prestigious portrait painting competi...
Emilia-Romagna – turn east from Rome and head north – tops Lonely Planet’s Best in Europe category for 2018. It’s got a lot going for it: Bologna (the main city), Ravenna (Italy’s best mosaics), Modena (fabulous food), Parma (the ham), Ferrara (a Renaissance gem), Rim...
A flag carrier is a national airline, an airline that ‘flies the flag’ internationally. Once upon a time you could add ‘at great expense’ because most flag carriers seemed to be bottomless pits for government money. Some of them still are and in Europe that descriptio...
Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian missile over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014 – almost four years ago – while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The Netherlands authorities have announced who did it – the Russian 53rd Anti-Aircraft Briga...
▲ When I was in Berlin last month I didn’t stay at the 25 Hours Hotel Bikini Berlin, because I was joining Maureen, she was on an opera tour and she was already installed at the Regent Hotel near the Staatsoper. I did go to have a look at the hotel because of this anc...
Flying between London and Melbourne in March-April I used seven different airlines for 11 flights, two of which (Adria and Emirates) had annoying delays. And one which I didn’t even fly on, but left me very impressed – Regent Airways of Bangladesh – we’ll get back to ...
There’s plenty of transport around Bangladesh, but it’s often lethally unsafe. The Bangladesh accident rate is not appalling against the population numbers, but presumably a large proportion of Bangladeshis never see a road. Against the number of vehicles (1000+ death...
My recent Bangladesh trip was primarily to visit the Rohingya refugee camps south of Cox’s Bazar, where the Myanmar army has shoved half a million of their Muslim citizens out of the country and in to refugee camps across the border in Bangladesh. It’s been described ...
Visiting the refugee camps in and around Kutupalong, south of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, was the principal reason for my recent visit to the country. Planet Wheeler, my foundation, works with COTE (Children on the Edge) to provide education to some of the children amo...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013