Arthur Frommer, whose guidebooks revolutionized leisure travel and encouraged budget vacations abroad, has died. He was 95.
Frommer died from complications of pneumonia, his daughter Pauline Frommer said Monday.
“My father opened up the world to so many people,” she said. “He believed deeply that travel could be an enlightening activity and one that did not require a big budget.”
Frommer began writing about travel while serving in the U.S. Army in Europe in the 1950s. When a guidebook he wrote for American soldiers overseas sold out, he launched what became one of the travel industry’s best-known brands, self-publishing Europe on 5 Dollars a Day in 1957.
“It struck a chord and became an immediate best-seller,” he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2007, on the 50th anniversary of the book’s debut.
Arthur Frommer tells CBC’s Midday about the type of travel he thinks is worthwhile — as well as the kind that isn’t.
It didn’t hurt that his books hit the market as the rise of jet travel made getting to Europe easier than crossing the Atlantic by ship.
Frommer told CBC’s Midday in a late 1980s appearance that travel ideally leaves you a “different person than when you began.”
“To me travel is no longer worth the effort unless it is associated with ideas and people, unless it stretches your horizons,” he said.
‘Really pioneering stuff’
The Frommer’s brand, led today by his daughter Pauline, remains one of the best-known names in the travel industry, with guidebooks to destinations around the world, an influential social media presence, podcasts and a radio show.
Frommer’s philosophy promoted staying in inns and budget hotels instead of five-star hotels, sightseeing using public transportation instead of guided tours, and eating with locals in small cafés instead of fancy restaurants. He said budget travel was preferable to luxury travel “because it leads to a more authentic experience.” That message encouraged average people, not just the wealthy, to vacation abroad.
Frommer’s advice also became so standard that it’s hard to remember how radical it seemed in the days before discount flights and backpacks.
“It was really pioneering stuff,” Tony Wheeler, founder of the Lonely Planet guidebook company, said in an interview in 2013. Before Frommer, Wheeler said, you could find guidebooks “that would tell you everything about the church or the temple ruin. But the idea that you wanted to eat somewhere and find a hotel or get from A to B — well, I’ve got a huge amount of respect for Arthur.”
Frommer also remained a well-known figure in 21st-century travel, opinionated to the end of his career, speaking out on his blog and radio show. He hated mega-cruise ships and railed against travel websites where consumers put up their own reviews, saying they were too easily manipulated with phony postings.
Frommer sold the guidebook company to Simon & Schuster. It was later acquired by Wiley Publishing, which in turn sold it to Google in 2012. Google quietly shut the guidebooks down, but Arthur Frommer — in a David vs. Goliath triumph — got his brand back from Google. In November 2013 with his daughter Pauline, he relaunched the print series with dozens of new guidebook titles.
“I never dreamed at my age I’d be working this hard,” he told the AP at the time, age 84.
Gave up fledgling law career
Frommer was born in Lynchburg, Va., and grew up during the Great Depression in Jefferson City, Mo., the child of a Polish father and Austrian mother.
“My father had one job after another, one company after another that went bankrupt,” he recalled. The family moved to New York when he was a teenager.
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He worked as an office boy at Newsweek, went to New York University and was drafted upon graduating from Yale Law School in 1953. Because he spoke French and Russian, he was sent to work in Army intelligence at a U.S. base in Germany, where the Cold War was heating up.
His first glimpse of Europe was from the window of a military transport plane. Whenever he had a weekend leave or a three-day pass, he’d hop a train to Paris or hitch a ride to England on an Air Force flight. Eventually he wrote The GI’s Guide to Traveling in Europe, and a few weeks before his Army stint was up, he had 5,000 copies printed by a typesetter in a German village. They were priced at 50 cents apiece, distributed by the Army newspaper, Stars & Stripes.
Shortly after he returned to New York to practise law at the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, he received a cable from Europe requesting a reprint, resulting in the very first Europe on 5 Dollars a Day.
Eventually Frommer gave up law to write the guides full-time.
To the end of his life, he said he avoided travelling first class.
“I fly economy class and I try to experience the same form of travel, the same experience that the average American and the average citizen of the world encounters,” he said.
The final editions of Frommer’s first series were titled Europe from $95 a Day. The concept no longer made sense when hotels could not be had for less than $100 a night, so that series was discontinued in 2007.
As Frommer aged, his daughter Pauline gradually became the force behind the company, promoting the brand, managing the business and even writing some of the content based on her own travels.
In addition to Pauline, Frommer’s survivors include his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld, and four grandchildren.
