Daniel Houghton is CEO of global travel publisher Lonely Planet

A RECLUSIVE billionaire shelled out millions for the Lonely Planet, and then he put a 24-year-old at the helm. So can this pup with no real credentials do the job?

WHEN reclusive tobacco billionaire Brad Kelley shelled out a reported $80 million for venerable travel publisher Lonely Planet, he put at the helm of the global business a 24-year-old named Daniel Houghton.

Many of the company’s existing staff immediately questioned Mr Houghton’s age and skills given he had only been out of university for three years with no real executive credentials. Within months, Mr Houghton had sacked a fifth of the staff, many of them in Melbourne, which seemingly confirmed many people’s fears of an impetuous and inexperienced pup.

But there is much more to the youngster, now 25, whose unusual encounter with his billionaire patron saw him evolve from wedding photographer to the CEO of an iconic business.

In an extensive profile piece in US travel magazine Outside, Mr Houghton details his rise to the top of the company founded by Tony and Maureen Wheeler in the early 1970s and headquartered in Australia.

Daniel Houghton, the 25-year-old head of Lonely Planet.

The Wheelers had sold the business to the BBC in 2007 for $210 million but Mr Kelley was able to snap it up for a fraction of the price due to falling profits brought on by a global recession, the high Australian dollar and digital challengers such as TripAdvisor.

Growing up in Georgia, Mr Houghton’s parents had worked for Delta Airlines, which instilled an early passion in travel and photography, Outside reported. He graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2010 with a major in photojournalism and minor in entrepreneurship. During his uni years, he had four of his photographs published on the Seattle Times’ front page, all while he was just an intern.

Six months into an unexciting gig with a small Kentucky marketing agency, Mr Houghton decided to go it alone and set up his own business, Houghton Multimedia, producing content for clients. On the side he consulted in digital media and lent himself out as a wedding photographer.

For decades, Lonely Planet has been perceived as a definitive traveller’s guide to the world’s iconic destinations.

While on a shoot for a local furniture business, he received a call with a request to meet a local businessman who had happened upon his website. Turning up in jeans to a nondescript building, he sat down with three men who asked him a variety of questions such his methods, his skills and what kind of budget he works with.

The three men were vetting him for the mysterious Mr Kelley, who would go on to meet him in a one-on-one a week later. To try to understand why Mr Kelley would take such a big chance on his eventual protégé, it helps to know a little about Mr Kelley himself.

A self-made billionaire, Mr Kelley is one of the largest private landowners in the US. Born and raised in Bowling Green, Kentucky (the home of Western Kentucky University), Mr Kelley bought his first piece of land at 17 years old. He went on to found cigarette company Commonwealth Brands in 1991, when he was 35 years old. He turned the business into a mammoth operation and eventually sold it 10 years later for $1 billion.

Scare Coeur de Monmartre at night — one of the 21 things to do in Paris, according to Lonely Planet.

Not much is known about Mr Kelley, but what can be gleaned is he values ambition, drive and focus. According to Outside, he said of Mr Houghton: “You just don’t find that many young people who are so focused on becoming something.”

When Mr Houghton met with Mr Kelley, it was a gentlemen’s agreement, just a handshake with no formal contract. Mr Houghton would continue to do what he does, except now he did it for Mr Kelley with the resources and mentorship the older man could offer. This was in May 2011.

Mr Houghton helped found NC2 Media, which he ran with a staff of five people. One of its projects was Outwild TV, which featured sponsored travel expeditions.

When Mr Kelley set Lonely Planet in his sights, the BBC weren’t ready to sell yet, even though the broadcaster had already had to writedown the business’ value. Lonely Planet had suffered from not aggressively venturing into digital formats, lagging behind its readers’ behaviours. Tony Wheeler has publicly criticised the BBC for being too cautious and not innovative with its investment.

Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler on the roof of his Footscray Lonely Planet head office in 2004.

While Mr Houghton’s instalment as the boss of Lonely Planet may have come as a surprise to the publisher’s staff and the business world, it wasn’t one for him. He had been involved in the due diligence for the deal and had suspected we would take a large role in the organisation by late 2012.

Two years after Mr Houghton and Mr Kelly first met, the acquisition of Lonely Planet was announced and by July Mr Houghton has instigated a wide-scale digital revamp as well as the aforementioned redundancies.

The Lonely Planet of Mr Houghton’s vision doesn’t resemble the indulgent Lonely Planet of old with its bacchanalian parties and mostly unchallenged dominance.

He told Outside: “You could argue this is a bad time to get into the business, but I think otherwise. The best time to get into an industry is when it’s in flux.”

Portugal’s Cascais, as featured in Lonely Planet’s ‘Coastal Retreats’.

His ambition is to design a Lonely Planet app that changes the way people travel. An app that could not only tell you where the nearest cafe in Venice is but an app which will also tell you in real time that Italians don’t drink cappuccinos in the afternoon and that you should order a macchiato instead and here’s how to do it.

To help him, he’s hired the equally youthful Matthew McCroskey as head of mobile. Mr McCroskey used to run a consulting firm in Nashville, Tennessee, where Mr Houghton is based. He’s also enlisted a particle physicist who was on the team which discovered the ‘God particle’ as a data scientist to sift through and analyse the company’s reams and reams of information.

But that is of little comfort to the writers and editors whose jobs were made redundant in the July purge. Mr Houghton said Mr Kelley had prepared him for the internal backlash that followed by emphasising that wanting to be liked and needing to be liked are different things.

“I became the director at 24 years old and I go and fire a bunch of people,” he told Outside. “They think I’m an idiot. It didn’t make me popular. Brad prepared me for that. The guy is a f***ing genius.”

Church and Athlone Castle on the Shannon River, featured in the Lonely Planet guide to Ireland.

However, Mr Houghton has made it clear expert writers are still very important to the company’s future, but it’s just they will have to share the printed and digital pages with more crowdsourced content makers.

Mr Houghton declined to reveal to Outside what the company’s profits are since he took over a year ago but did say digital now accounted for a third of its revenue.

Asked what he thinks of someone so young running the business he founded, the original Lonely Planet-er Tony Wheeler, told Outside: “If you’re going to do something different, then you better do it with somebody different.

“Certainly you don’t want someone old and set in his way — like me — at the controls. Is he the right 25-year-old? Jury is out on that one. He seems like a nice guy.”