I suffered a sentimental pang this week when I read that Lonely Planet has been sold and is being bought by BBC Worldwide.

When I went off round the world a few years ago, Lonely Planet guides were my constant companion - without them I would have been completely lost (indeed until I did find them, I was lost!). Their books, at least the ones I was using, had a very distinctive backpacker style and ethos - they were definitely much more than just a guidebook. No doubt some of this was just good marketing to their audience, but I certainly felt a lot of affinity with them.

I can remember well at one point somewhere in India someone having a different brand of guide (Rough Guide, I think), and among the group of people I was with at the time, this causing some slight bemusement - why would you use any guide other than Lonely Planet? Was it perhaps better? No, he said, he had just chosen Rough Guide to make a change from LP, he said, which, like everyone else, he had used all the rest of the time.

Getting the right guide, and in the most up to date edition so that the places weren’t three years out of date, at times took on great importance - I can remember once spending the best part of an (admittedly very pleasant) day searching around Delhi bookshops looking for the latest LP Canada (where I was going next).

In more recent times, when I’ve travelled on slightly smarter trips I thought I ought to use a better class of guide. But after trying a few I find I have largely gone back to LP - the more upmarket and more expensively-produced guides have tended just to be completely rubbish guides, with no information in them, and the other lower-market ones just tend to make the places sound really depressing and as if going there was more something to be endured than enjoyed. By contrast, LP books are familiar, excited about their venue, trustworthy in their recommendations, and have beautiful and clear maps. And over the years as some of their clientele have grown older, they also seem to have done a good job of developing their products to tailor them to different markets.

So, even though I was always actually quite sceptical about the cheesiness of the story printed in every book about how Tony and Maureen Wheeler started LP hand-stapling books on their kitchen table, I was sorry to think of it disappearing into some faceless corporate. But at least it’s going to someone also fairly ethical and impartial, I guess (an arm of the BBC) - and not being snapped by Murdoch!