Last year, a media-shy billionaire bought the flailing Lonely Planet travel-guide empire, then shocked observers by hiring an unknown 24-year-old former wedding photographer to save it. Charles Bethea straps in for a bizarre ride as a kid mogul tries to remake a legendary brand for the digital age.
Houghton's office. His dad did the drywall. Photo: Andrew Hetherington
I'm supposed to go flying over New Zealand's South Island with the director of the world's largest guidebook company, but I'm feeling haggard. Last night, Daniel Houghton and I made a little tour of Queenstown's bars: Winnies, the Buffalo Club, Zephyr, a few other places. There was a retractable roof, a lot of Red Bull and vodka, dancing and yelling, and a video of a man in a wingsuit tearing through narrow canyons. I left the last place—I think it was the Boiler Room—before Houghton did. "I don't feel anything yet," he said, ordering another drink around 2:30 a.m.
But when I knock on his hotel room door at 7:30, Houghton, now 25, is chipper. The space is fastidiously organized: bed made, camera gear in one neat pile, North Face and J.Crew clothes in another. Houghton, who is six foot four and 150 pounds, with a long neck and blue eyes, has rewired the sound system in the room to allow him to play M83 and the Lord of the Rings soundtrack from his iPhone. As he waves me in, he's on the line with his boss, billionaire Brad Kelley, the former tobacco magnate who bought Lonely Planet last year, when the storied company was in the midst of a financial nosedive. Houghton wishes Kelley a happy birthday, then we're off to ride what's billed as the steepest tree-to-tree zip-line on earth.
Houghton is in New Zealand to relax. He has been at Lonely Planet's helm for nine months, during which time he has invested heavily in a digital revamp and laid off nearly one-fifth of the workforce. "It's hard to turn a cruise ship around, so we had to get in a lifeboat," he told me before we traveled to Queenstown. "A small one." He has also come to see how the sausage gets made, accompanying a writer and a photographer on assignment for the company's glossy British magazine. The itinerary includes rafting the Class IV Shotover River, hiking the famed Routeburn Track, drinking Pinot at top wineries, off-roading in Houghton's dream truck (a Land Rover Defender, not available in the U.S.), watching the sunset over Lake Wakatipu, and searching for the moa, an enormous flightless bird capable of disemboweling a man with a claw swipe. Scientific consensus says that the moa probably went extinct about 400 years ago, but that doesn't dissuade Houghton. A typical guidebook-reporting trip, he tells me, "would be boring."
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But when I knock on his hotel room door at 7:30, Houghton, now 25, is chipper. The space is fastidiously organized: bed made, camera gear in one neat pile, North Face and J.Crew clothes in another. Houghton, who is six foot four and 150 pounds, with a long neck and blue eyes, has rewired the sound system in the room to allow him to play M83 and the Lord of the Rings soundtrack from his iPhone. As he waves me in, he's on the line with his boss, billionaire Brad Kelley, the former tobacco magnate who bought Lonely Planet last year, when the storied company was in the midst of a financial nosedive. Houghton wishes Kelley a happy birthday, then we're off to ride what's billed as the steepest tree-to-tree zip-line on earth.
Houghton is in New Zealand to relax. He has been at Lonely Planet's helm for nine months, during which time he has invested heavily in a digital revamp and laid off nearly one-fifth of the workforce. "It's hard to turn a cruise ship around, so we had to get in a lifeboat," he told me before we traveled to Queenstown. "A small one." He has also come to see how the sausage gets made, accompanying a writer and a photographer on assignment for the company's glossy British magazine. The itinerary includes rafting the Class IV Shotover River, hiking the famed Routeburn Track, drinking Pinot at top wineries, off-roading in Houghton's dream truck (a Land Rover Defender, not available in the U.S.), watching the sunset over Lake Wakatipu, and searching for the moa, an enormous flightless bird capable of disemboweling a man with a claw swipe. Scientific consensus says that the moa probably went extinct about 400 years ago, but that doesn't dissuade Houghton. A typical guidebook-reporting trip, he tells me, "would be boring."
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