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An expose about writing travel guides

Los Angeles: The language was hardly typical of the CEO of a respected travel guide publisher. “This is a ****,” Lonely Planet chief executive Judy Slatyer wrote to employees. “None of you deserve it, given the effort you put in.”

The problem for Ms. Slatyer and her colleagues was what one of them described in another company-wide message as “a car crash waiting to happen”: a Lonely Planet author had published an expose of the world of budget-travel writing.

Thomas Kohnstamm, co-author of a dozen Lonely Planet guides to Latin America and the Caribbean, has written his own book. In it he tells how the life of a travel writer is one of poor pay, dealing drugs to make ends meet, cribbing information from other sources and, in one case, failing to visit the country he was writing about.

The furore over Mr. Kohnstamm’s claims threaten to undermine the series’ most important asset: trustworthiness.

“I found out very quickly I was not able to go to all the places I needed to go to,” he told interviewers at the weekend. “I was not able to make the money stretch out to the end. They didn’t pay me enough to go to Colombia. I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a woman I was dating who was an intern in the Colombian consulate.”

Lonely Planet, which sells more than 6 million guidebooks each year, moved swiftly to counter Mr. Kohnstamm’s charges. “For those who don’t know,” Ms. Slatyer wrote in the message to a private Lonely Planet Yahoo group, “Thomas Kohnstamm has written a book ... about his somewhat self-indulgent experience working on the previous edition of our Brazil guide. The book’s press release highlights his sexual encounters with a waitress [allegedly resulting in a good review for the restaurant] and his need to deal drugs to supplement his author fee, as well as less titillating complaints against us on unrealistic deadlines, lack of money, and lack of support when he was on the road.

“Thomas also claims that due to lack of time and money, information in his titles is fictitious or plagiarised, and that he acted against our stated policies and accepted freebies, which compromised his recommendations.”

But another Lonely Planet author, Jeanne Oliver, who has written Lonely Planet guides to several European countries, wrote back that the company should shoulder some responsibility.

When Mr. Kohnstamm was recruited to write for Lonely Planet, he had few obvious qualifications other than the ability to speak Spanish. He left his Wall Street job, he has said, threw his mobile phone in a river and went to Brazil, where Portuguese is spoken. He went on to contribute to guides to Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, and Chile. The company said his claims that he did not travel to Colombia were “disingenuous,” because he was hired to write about the history of the country, not to travel there.

“I’ve been contacted by a number of other Lonely Planet writers and everyone who has bothered to be in contact said, ’Good on you, it’s a story that needed to be told,’” Mr. Kohnstamm said. “But the book is fundamentally about my personal experience and not intended as an expose on Lonely Planet.” For now, Mr. Kohnstamm says his days of exotic adventure are behind him. He has moved back to his native Seattle, and lives three minutes away from the house he grew up in. Soon, however, he embarks on another journey, to Australia, where Lonely Planet is based, to promote his book, Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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