Arthur Frommer, pioneer of budget travel, died yesterday at the age of 95. his daughter Pauline Frommer wrote yesterday afternoon.
As an active-duty officer in the U.S. Army working in Europe after World War II, he self-published his GI's Guide to Traveling in Europe in 1955. It became the prototype for every series of English-language guides that followed. , from Lonely Planet to Let's Go to Rough Guides, and more. He turned the follow-up, the seminal Europe on $5 a Day, into a brand and then a publishing empire that is now run by his daughter.
The GI Guide came about because as a soldier, Arthur realized that when he had a few days off, he could board a military transport plane and fly to another European destination in a few hours. He took advantage of this advantage, then explained to his colleagues, and then to the world, how they could do the same.
Over the next 70 years, he continued to show people where they could have a great experience outside the comfort of home.
It was not a straight path. Arthur was a first generation American. His mother and father were recent immigrants to the United States who met at a Jewish social club in Syracuse, New York.
He grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, then moved to New York with his family when he was a teenager. He graduated from New York University in 1950, earned a law degree at Yale, and then was drafted into the Army, which curiously led to his career as a travel pioneer.
Frommer's impact
After Europe's success with $5 a day, things moved quickly. Several books in the series followed as dollar amounts and geographic regions increased. In the meantime, he built four hotels and established a travel agency.
For Arthur, the focus has always been on value. After the success of his first self-published book, Frommer remained true to his dedication to budget travel, even as he became a successful publisher and travel expert.
Frommer, whatever his dollar a day, became a mainstay for three decades. For anyone perusing the array of travel guides at a library or bookstore, the numbers in the titles show what a world is possible for American travelers venturing abroad.
His brand of travel guides changed hands several times beginning in the late 1970s, beginning with Simon and Schuster and finally Google in 2012 before he I got the name back in 2013.
In between, Arthur had a local and then syndicated radio show in New York and beyond. He launched Frommers.com in 1997, then launched Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel Magazine, which was published from 1998 to 2012.
On the 50th anniversary of $5-a-day Europe in 2007, Frommer launched a daily blog at Frommers.com, which he published every weekday for nearly a decade, with only 6 month break between when Wiley sold Frommer's to Google and he and his daughter Pauline Frommer retained the publishing rights under the brand.
Beyond the pages
Before Rafat and I started Skift, I worked with Arthur every day for about five years at Frommers.com, then owned by John Wiley & Sons. It started with a week's worth of blog posts faxed from Columbus Circle in New York to Hoboken, New Jersey, then retyped. He told the editor of Frommer's, “I want to start a blog,” and then he did.
Arthur worked hard. As an editor, I would receive emails after 11 p.m. letting me know his blog posts were ready for the next day. I rarely received fewer than three messages per day, and they were never based on press releases. Two years after starting the blog, he rewrote and edited numerous articles in the book Ask Arthur Frommer.
He had favorite subjects. His enthusiasm for the Oxford Adult Learning Summer Program – and similar programs elsewhere – was as reliable as the calendar. Fiercely opinionated, Frommer did not hesitate to criticize companies he believed were harming customers. And he wasn't a fan of the big cruise lines.
Despite his wide appeal across the United States, Arthur did not try to make everyone happy and spoke out on issues he deemed important. In the mid-2000s, this included a boycott of travel to Burma.
In 2009, in response to gunmen gathering outside a speech by President Barack Obama in Phoenix, Arizona, Arthur wrote that the state's laws on carrying firearms in public places made him rethink future trips there.. The next day, a Fox News evening show devoted a segment to Arthur's comments – death threats quickly poured in in the form of comments on the blog post.
The digital team spent the weekend deleting tens of thousands of comments from users promising to shoot or lynch Frommer and his family. In response, Arizona political leaders proposed boycotting Wiley's books in schools. Three months after Arthur took office, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the face at a political rally in Arizona.
Legacy
Arthur Frommer showed Americans how to travel in Europe better than anyone. He repeatedly emphasized that you didn't have to be rich to experience the world and that you could simply have worse times if you had a lot of money.
Occasionally this led in a strange direction (he once told me that eating in hospital cafeterias was a good idea because they were cheap because they were subsidized), but it almost always led to travelers from doors that previously seemed closed.
