New York – Arthur Frommer, whose “Europe for $5 a Day” guidebooks revolutionized leisure travel by convincing average Americans to take budget vacations abroad, has died. He was 95.
Frommer died of complications from pneumonia, his daughter Pauline Frommer said Monday.
“My father opened the world to so many people,” she said. “He deeply believed that travel could be an enlightening activity that did not require a large budget.”
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Frommer began writing about travel while serving in the U.S. Army in Europe in the 1950s. When a travel guide he wrote for American soldiers abroad sold out, he launched what would become one of the travel industry’s best-known brands, self-publishing “Europe for $5 a Day” in 1957.
“It struck a chord and became 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’s brand, today led by Pauline Frommer, remains one of the best-known names in the travel industry, with travel guides to destinations around the world, an influential social media presence, podcasts and a radio show.
Frommer’s philosophy—staying in inns and budget hotels instead of five-star hotels, sightseeing on your own using public transportation, eating with locals in small cafes instead of fancy restaurants—changed the way Americans traveled in the mid-20th century. He said budget travel is preferable to luxury travel “because it leads to a more authentic experience.” That message encouraged average people, not just the wealthy, to vacation abroad.
It didn’t hurt that his books hit the market, as the rise of air travel made it easier to reach Europe than crossing 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 encountering Frommer’s travel guides in the hands of every other American tourist.
Seth Wenig / AP
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 groundbreaking stuff,” said Tony Wheeler, founder of travel guide company Lonely Planet, in a 2013 interview. Before Frommer, Wheeler said, you could find guidebooks “that would tell you all about the church or the temple ruins. But the idea that you want to eat somewhere and find a hotel or go from A to B, well, I have enormous respect for 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 editions of Frommer’s groundbreaking series were titled “Europe from $95 a Day.”
Frommer guides reborn
The concept no longer made sense when hotels were no longer available for less than $100 a night, so the series was canceled in 2007. But Frommer’s publishing empire did not disappear, despite a series of sales that began when 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 down the travel guides, but Arthur Frommer – in a David versus Goliath triumph – got his brand back from Google. In November 2013, he and his daughter Pauline relaunched the print series with dozens of new travel guide titles.
“I never dreamed at my age that I would work so hard,” he told the AP at the time, aged 84.
Frommer also remained a well-known figure in the 21st century travel industry, with an opinionated opinion until the end of his career, speaking out on his blog and radio show.
He loathed mega cruise ships and criticized travel websites where consumers posted their own reviews, saying they could be too easily manipulated with false messages. 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.
The roots of the depression era
Frommer was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, and grew up during the Great Depression in Jefferson City, Missouri, to a Polish father and an Austrian mother. “My father had one job after another, one company after another that went bankrupt,” he remembers. The family moved to New York when he was a teenager. He worked as an office boy at Newsweek, attended New York University and was drafted when he graduated from Yale Law School in 1953. Because he spoke French and Russian, he was sent to work in Army Intelligence at an American base in Germany, where the Cold War was escalating.
His first glimpse of Europe was from the window of a military transport plane. When he had a weekend leave or a three-day pass, he would hop on a train to Paris or hitch a ride on an air force flight to England.
He eventually wrote The GI’s Guide to Traveling in Europe and a few weeks before his army stint was over, he had 5,000 copies printed by a typesetter in a German village. They cost 50 cents each and were distributed by the military newspaper Stars & Stripes.
Shortly after returning to New York to practice law at the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, he received a telegram from Europe. “The book was sold out, should I arrange a reprint?” he said.
Shortly afterwards, he spent the month’s vacation at the law firm creating a civilian version of the guide. “In 30 days I went to 15 different cities, got up at 4 a.m. and ran through the streets, looking for good, cheap hotels and restaurants,” he recalls.
The resulting book, the first ever “Europe on $5 a Day,” was much more than a list. It was written with a wide-eyed wonder that bordered on poetry: “Venice is a fantastic dream,” Frommer wrote. “Try to arrive at night, when the wonders of the city can overtake you bit by bit and slowly. … Out of the dark appear small clusters of candy-striped mooring posts; a gondola approaches with a lighted lantern hanging from the bow hangs.”
Frommer eventually gave up the rights to write the guides full-time.
Daughter Pauline accompanied him with his first wife, Hope Arthur, on their travels from 1965, when she was four months old. “They joked that the book should be called ‘Europe on five diapers a day’,” says Pauline Frommer.
In the 1960s, when inflation forced Frommer to change the book’s title to “Europe for $5 and $10 a Day,” he said, “It was as if someone had stuck a knife in my head.”
Remove wrong impressions
Asked to summarize the impact of his books in a 2017 Associated Press interview, he said that by the 1950s, “most Americans had learned that traveling abroad was a unique experience, especially traveling to Europe.” that they were going to a war-torn country where it was risky to stay in anything other than a five-star hotel. It was risky to go to anything other than a high-end restaurant… And I knew all that warning was a load of nonsense.”
He added: “We were pioneers in suggesting that a different type of American should travel, that you didn’t have to be wealthy.”
To the end of his life, he said he avoided traveling in first class. “I’m flying economy class and trying to experience the same kind of travel, the same experience that the average American and the average global citizen encounters,” he said.
As Frommer grew older, his daughter Pauline gradually became the force behind the company, promoting the brand, running the business and even writing some of the content based on her own travels. Her relationship with her father was both tender and respectful, and she summed it up this way in a 2012 email to AP: “It’s great to have a working partner whose mind is a steel trap and who not only has smarts, but also wisdom. His opinions, whether you agree with them or not, come from his social values. He is a man who puts ethics at the center of his life and weaves them into everything he does. ”
In addition to Pauline, Frommer’s survivors include his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld, and four grandchildren.
