Lonely Planet Thorn Tree

» see lonelyplanet.com/thorntree as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The guidebooks reached Turkey. The forum did not reach me. Lonely Planet was on the shelf in Turkish bookshops the same as everywhere else, and i knew what it was, but Thorn Tree was an English-language backpacker forum for people planning six months overland, and that was never the trip i was taking. i am writing this from the record and from the people who have written about losing it.

The name comes from a real tree. There is an acacia in the courtyard of the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi that travelers have been pinning notes to since 1902, on the reasonable theory that anyone you were trying to find in East Africa would eventually walk past it. Lonely Planet took that idea onto its website in 1996 and it turned out to be the correct metaphor, because the internet version worked the same way. You posted a question into the air and someone who had been there answered.

What it held by the end was something like twenty-five years of specific, dated answers. Which bus company still runs that route, and what a taxi from the airport should cost so you know when you are being taken. None of that is in a guidebook, because a guidebook is eighteen months out of date on the day it is printed, and all of it is exactly what a forum is good at.

~ the dossier ~

~ the 2012 scare ~

Lonely Planet was owned by BBC Worldwide from 2007, which turned out to matter. In late 2012 a Thorn Tree user who had been researching an article on travel communities wrote to the BBC's acting director-general about what was on the forum. This was weeks after the Jimmy Savile revelations, at a point where nobody at the BBC was going to take a chance on anything.

The whole forum was suspended in December 2012. The BBC said afterward that it had found no evidence of discussions concerning pedophilia but had found instances of inappropriate language and themes, which is the sound of an organization looking for a way to climb back down. Thorn Tree returned in 2013 with new moderation, and the welcome-back thread ran to seventy-eight pages of people arguing about it. That should have been the near-death experience it survived.

~ what got buried with it ~

The actual end had nothing to do with content. Lonely Planet was sold to NC2 Media in 2013 at a loss of roughly eighty million pounds against what the BBC had paid, then sold again to Red Ventures in December 2020. In April 2020 the forum was locked into read-only as the company shut down most of its operations, since there was no travel to talk about and the offices were closing.

It never came back. In September 2021 Lonely Planet announced it was closing Thorn Tree completely and removing it, on the reasoning that travelers now needed different kinds of tools. Everyone was pointed at the company's accounts on the social platforms instead. The forum went and the archive went with it. Twenty-five years of route advice written by the people who had walked the route was deleted from the web on the same day, and what survives is whatever the Internet Archive happened to have crawled. The tree in Nairobi is still standing.

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