NEW YORK – Arthur Frommer, whose travel guide revolutionized “Europe for $5 a Day.” Leisure travel by convincing average Americans to take inexpensive vacations abroad has died. He was 95.
Frommer died because of this of pneumonia, his daughter Pauline Frommer said on Monday.
“My father opened the world to so many people,” she said. “He firmly believed that travel could be an enlightening activity that did not require a large budget.”
While serving within the U.S. Army in Europe within the Nineteen Fifties, Frommer began writing about travel. When a travel guide he wrote for American soldiers overseas sold out, he founded one in every of the travel industry's best-known brands: Self-published “Europe for 5 dollars a day” in 1957.
“It captured the spirit of the times and became an instant bestseller,” he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2007, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s debut.
The Frommer's brand, now run by his daughter Pauline, stays one in every of the best-known names within the travel industry, with travel guides to destinations all over the world, an influential social media presence, podcasts and a radio show.
Frommer's philosophy — staying in inns and budget hotels moderately than five-star hotels, sightseeing on your personal using public transportation, eating with locals in small cafes moderately than fancy restaurants — modified the best way Americans lived within the mid-to-late twentieth century . century traveled. He said budget travel is preferable to luxury travel “because it leads to a more authentic experience.” This message encouraged average residents, not only the rich, to vacation abroad.
It didn't hurt that his books hit the market, because the rise of jet travel made attending to Europe easier than crossing the Atlantic by ship. The books became so popular that there was a time while you couldn't visit a spot just like the Eiffel Tower without spotting Frommer's guidebook within the hands of each other American tourist.
Frommer's advice has also turn out to be so standard that it's hard to recollect how radical it seemed in the times before low-cost flights and backpacks. “It was really groundbreaking,” Tony Wheeler, founding father of the travel guide company Lonely Planet, said in a 2013 interview. Before Frommer, Wheeler says, there have been guidebooks “that would tell you everything about the church or the temple ruins.” But the concept that you desired to eat somewhere and discover a hotel or get from A to B – well, I actually have plenty of respect in front of Arthur.”
“Arthur did for travel what Consumer Reports did for everything else,” said 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.” The concept not made sense when hotels couldn't be had for lower than $100 an evening, so the series was canceled in 2007. But the Frommer publishing empire didn't 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 discontinued the guides, but Arthur Frommer – in a David versus Goliath triumph – got his trademark back from Google. In November 2013, he and his daughter Pauline relaunched the print series with dozens of latest travel guide titles.
“I never imagined at my age that I would work so hard,” he told the AP on the time, aged 84.
Frommer also remained a well known figure within the twenty first century travel industry, speaking out on his blog and radio show until the tip of his profession. He hated mega-cruise ships and railed against travel web sites where consumers post their very own reviews because they may too easily be manipulated by fake posts. And he coined the term “Trump Slump” in a widely quoted column that predicted a collapse in tourism to the United States following the election of Donald Trump as president.
Frommer was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, and grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, through the Great Depression, to a Polish father and an Austrian mother. “My father had one job after another, one company after another that went bankrupt,” he recalled. When he was a youngster, the family moved to New York. He worked as an office boy at Newsweek, went to New York University and was drafted after graduating from Yale Law School in 1953. Because he spoke French and Russian, he was sent to Army Intelligence at a U.S. base in Germany, where the Cold War was intensifying.
His first view of Europe was from the window of a military transport plane. Whenever he had a weekend vacation or a three-day pass, he would take a train to Paris or hitchhike an Air Force flight to England. He eventually wrote “The GI's Guide to Traveling in Europe” and had 5,000 copies printed by a typesetter in a German village a number of weeks before the tip of his military tour. They cost 50 cents each and were distributed by the military newspaper Stars & Stripes.
Shortly after returning to New York to practice law on the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, he received a telegram from Europe. “The book was sold out, would I reprint it?” he said.
Shortly after spending his month-long vacation on the law firm, he wrote a civil version of the guide. “In 30 days, I traveled to 15 different cities, getting up at 4 a.m., walking up and down the streets, trying to find good, cheap hotels and restaurants,” he remembers.
The resulting book, the first-ever Europe for $5 a Day, was far more than a listing. It was written with a way of wonder that bordered on poetry: “Venice is a fantastic dream,” Frommer wrote. “Try to arrive at night, when the wonders of the city can conquer you little by little and slowly. …From the darkness, small clusters of candy-colored mooring poles appear; A gondola is approaching with a burning lantern hanging on its bow.”
Eventually Frommer gave up law school to put in writing the guides full-time. Daughter Pauline accompanied him and his first wife, Hope Arthur, on their travels starting in 1965, when she was 4 months old. “They used to joke that the book should be called ‘Europe on Five Diapers a Day,’” said Pauline Frommer.
When inflation within the Sixties forced Frommer to vary the book's title to “Europe for $5 and $10 a Day,” he said, “It was like someone had stuck a knife in my head.”
When asked to summarize the impact of his books in a 2017 interview with the Associated Press, he said: “In the 1950s, most Americans were taught that foreign travel was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, especially travel to Europe.” They were taught that they’d travel to a war-torn country where it will be dangerous to remain in anything aside from a five-star hotel. It was dangerous to enter anything aside from a high-class restaurant. … And I knew that every one these warnings were a load of nonsense.”
He added: “We were pioneers in also suggesting that a different type of American should travel, that you don't have to be well-heeled.”
He avoided traveling in firstclass until the tip of his life. “I fly economy class and try to experience the same type of travel, the same experience that the average American and the average global citizen has,” he said.
As Frommer grew older, his daughter Pauline step by step became the driving force behind the corporate, promoting the brand, running the business and even writing a number of the content based on her own travels. Her relationship along with her father was each tender and respectful, and he or she summed it up in a 2012 email to AP: “It is wonderful to have a piece partner whose mind is a steel trap and who is just not only smart but… also wisdom. His opinions, whether you agree with them or not, are based on his social values. He is a person who puts ethics at the middle of his life and infuses them into every little thing he does.”
In addition to Pauline, Frommer's survivors include his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld, and 4 grandchildren.
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