New York – Arthur Frommer, whose guidebook “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” revolutionized leisure travel by persuading average Americans to take budget vacations abroad, has died. He is 95 years old.
Frommer died of complications from pneumonia, Pauline Frommer’s son said Monday.
“My father opened up the world to so many people,” she said. “He strongly believes that traveling can be a fun activity and doesn’t require a huge budget.”
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Frommer began writing about his travels while serving in the US Army in Europe in the 1950s. When the guidebook he wrote for American soldiers overseas sold, he launched the most famous brand in the travel industry, self-publishing “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” in 1957.
“It was a surprise and an instant bestseller,” he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2007, on the 50th anniversary of the book’s debut.
The Frommer brand, led today by Pauline Frommer, remains one of the most recognizable names in the travel industry, with guidebooks to destinations around the world, social media influencers, podcasts and radio shows.
Frommer’s philosophy – staying in inns and budget hotels instead of five-star hotels, seeing yourself using public transportation, eating with locals in small cafes instead of fancy restaurants – changed the way Americans traveled in the mid to late 20th century. rather than luxury travel “because it leads to a more authentic experience.” The message encourages ordinary people, not just the wealthy, to vacation abroad.
It didn’t feel like his books were reaching the market because the rise of jet travel made it easier to get to Europe than to cross the Atlantic by ship.
The books became so popular that there was a time when you couldn’t visit a place like the Eiffel Tower without seeing Frommer’s guidebook in the hands of every other American tourist.
Seth Wenig / AP
Frommer’s advice is also a standard that’s hard to remember how radical it was in the days before discount flights and backpacks.
“This is really pioneering,” said Tony Wheeler, founder of the guidebook company Lonely Planet, in an interview in 2013. Before Frommer, Wheeler said, you could find a guidebook “that would tell you everything about the church or the ruins of the temple. But the idea is that you want to eat everywhere and find a hotel or go from A to B – well, I respect Arthur.
“Arthur did for travel what Consumer Reports did for everything else,” says Pat Carrier, former owner of The Globe Corner, a travel bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The final edition of Frommer’s groundbreaking series titled “Europe from $95 a Day.”
The Frommer’s Guide is reborn
The concept no longer existed when hotels could not earn less than $100 per night, so the series stopped in 2007. But Frommer’s publishing empire did not disappear, although some sales began when Frommer sold the guidebook. company for Simon & Schuster. It was then acquired by Wiley Publishing, which is one sold to Google in 2012. Google quietly closed the handbooks, but Arthur Frommer – in the victory of David vs. Goliath – rebranding from Google. In November 2013 with his daughter Pauline, he launched a print series with dozens of new guidebook titles.
“I never dreamed at my age that I would be working so hard,” he told the AP at the age of 84.
Frommer also remained a well-known figure in travel in the 21st century, opinionated until the end of his career, speaking on blogs and radio shows.
He hates mega-cruise ships and railed against travel websites where consumers put up their own reviews, saying they are too easily deceived by fake posts. And he coined the phrase “Trump Slump” in a widely quoted column predicting a slump in tourism to the US after Donald Trump was elected president for the first time.
Depression era roots
Frommer was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, and grew up during the Great Depression in Jefferson City, Missouri, the son of a Polish father and an Austrian mother. “My father was the only one working, the only company that went bankrupt,” he recalled. His family moved to New York when he was young. He worked as an office clerk at Newsweek, attended New York University and was drafted after graduating from Yale Law School in 1953. Because he spoke French and Russian, he was sent to work in Army intelligence at a US base in Germany, where the Cold War began hot.
He saw Europe for the first time from the window of a military transport plane. Whenever he had a weekend off or a three-day pass, he would take the train to Paris or fly to England on an Air Force plane.
Eventually, he wrote “The GI’s Guide to Traveling in Europe” and, a few weeks before his Army assignment ended, he had 5,000 copies printed by a clerk in a German village. They cost 50 cents each and were distributed by the Army’s newspaper, Stars & Stripes.
Shortly after returning to New York to practice law at the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, he received a cable from Europe. “The book is out of stock, can I order a reprint?” said.
Not long after, he spent a month’s vacation from the law firm doing civil version guidance. “In 30 days I went to 15 different cities, got up at 4 in the morning, walked the streets, tried to find cheap hotels and restaurants,” he said.
The resulting book, the first “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day,” is much more than a list. It is written with a magic that bends over poetry: “Venice is a beautiful dream,” Frommer wrote. “Try to come at night when the magic of the city can steal you slowly and slowly. … From the darkness, there are small clusters of candy mooring temples; gondolas approach with lanterns hanging from the prow. .”
Frommer eventually gave up law to write guides full-time.
Princess Pauline joined her first husband, Hope Arthur, on the trip in 1965, when she was 4 months old. “He used to joke that the book should be called ‘Europe in Five Diapers a Day,'” Pauline Frommer said.
In the 1960s, when inflation forced Frommer to change the title of his book to “Europe on 5 and 10 Dollars a Day,” he said “it was as if someone had plunged a knife into my head.”
Eliminate false impressions
Asked to summarize the impact of his books in a 2017 Associated Press interview, he said that in the 1950s, “most Americans had been taught that foreign travel was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, especially traveling to Europe. They were going to war-torn countries where it was risky.” to stay in any hotel other than a five-star hotel It’s risky to go to anything but a top-ranking restaurant… And I know that all these dangers are a lot of nonsense.”
He added: “We are pioneers also suggesting that different types of Americans should travel, you don’t have to have good rights.”
To the end of his life, he said he never traveled first class. “I fly economy class and I try to have the same journey, the same experience as the average American and the average citizen of the world,” he said.
As Frommer came of age, daughter Pauline gradually became the force behind the company, promoting the brand, managing the business and even writing some content based on her own travels. Her relationship with her father was tender and respectful, and she summed it up this way in a 2012 email to the AP: “It’s great to have a colleague whose mind is a steel trap and who not only has intelligence, but wisdom. . His opinion, whether you agree with it or not, it comes from social values.
In addition to Pauline, Frommer’s survivors include his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld, and four grandchildren.
