Arthur Frommer, whose Europe $5-a-day guidebooks revolutionized leisure travel by convincing average Americans to take low-budget vacations abroad, has died. He was 95 years old.
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 a rewarding activity that did not require a large budget.”
Frommer began writing about travel while serving in the U.S. Army in Europe in the 1950s. When a guidebook he had written for American soldiers overseas went out of print, he launched what became one of the travel industry's best-known brands, self-publishing Europe on 5 Dollars a Day in 1957.
“It struck a chord and immediately became a bestseller,” he recalled in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press, on the 50th anniversary of the book's release.
The Frommer's brand, run today by his daughter Pauline, remains one of the best-known names in the travel industry, with destination guides around the world, an influential social media presence, podcasts and a radio show.
Frommer's philosophy – staying in budget hostels and hotels instead of five-star hotels, sightseeing on your own using public transport, eating with locals in small cafes rather than fancy restaurants – changed the way Americans traveled in the mid-to-late 20th century. He said budget travel was preferable to luxury travel “because it leads to a more authentic experience.” This message encouraged ordinary people, not just the rich, to vacation abroad.
It didn't hurt that his books hit the market, as the rise of air travel made getting to Europe easier 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 spotting Frommer's guidebooks in the hands of every other American tourist.
Frommer's advice has also become so commonplace that it's hard to remember how radical it seemed in the days before discount flights and backpacks. “It was really a pioneering project,” Tony Wheeler, founder of the Lonely Planet guidebook company, said in a 2013 interview. Before Frommer, Wheeler said, you could find guidebooks “that told you everything about the church or temple ruins. But the idea that you want to eat somewhere and find a hotel or get from point A to point B – well, I have enormous respect for Arthur.
The final editions of Frommer's groundbreaking series were titled Europe from $95 a Day. The concept no longer made sense when hotels couldn't be had for less than $100 a night, which is why the series was discontinued in 2007. But Frommer's publishing empire didn't disappear , despite a series of sales that began when Frommer sold the guide company to Simon and Schuster. It was then acquired by Wiley Publishing, which in turn sold it to Google in 2012. Google quietly shut down the guides, but Arthur Frommer – in a David versus Goliath triumph – reclaimed his brand from Google. In November 2013, with his daughter Pauline, he relaunched the printed series with dozens of new guide titles.
“I never dreamed at my age that I would work this hard,” the 84-year-old told the AP at the time.
Frommer also remained a well-known figure in 21st century travel, opinionated until the end of his career, speaking out on his blog and radio show. He hated mega-cruise ships and attacked travel websites where consumers posted their own reviews, saying they were too easily manipulated with fake posts. And he coined the phrase “Trump collapse” in a widely cited article that predicted a collapse in U.S. tourism after Donald Trump was elected president.
Frommer was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, and grew up during the Great Depression in Jefferson City, Missouri, the child of a Polish father and an Austrian mother. “My father had one job after another, one company after another, which went bankrupt,” he remembers. He was recruited after graduating from Yale Law School in 1953.
His first glimpse of Europe was from the window of a military transport plane. Whenever he had a weekend off or a three-day pass, he took a train to Paris or hitchhiked to England on an Air Force flight. Eventually he wrote The GI's Guide to Traveling in Europe, and a few weeks before the end of his military service he had 5,000 copies printed by a composer in a German village. They were sold for 50 cents each, distributed by the military newspaper Stars & Stripes.
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Shortly after returning to New York to practice law with the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, he received a cable from Europe. “The book was out of print, could I arrange a reprint?” » he said.
Shortly afterward, he spent his vacation month away from the law firm writing a civilian version of the guide. “In 30 days, I went to 15 different cities, getting up at 4 a.m., running through the streets, trying to find good cheap hotels and restaurants,” he recalls.
The resulting book, the first-ever European book 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 wash over you slowly and piecemeal… In the darkness, small clusters of candy-striped bollards appear; a gondola approaches with a lit lantern hanging from its bow.
Eventually, Frommer left law to write guidebooks full time. His daughter Pauline joined him and his first wife, Hope Arthur, on their travels beginning in 1965, when she was four months old. “They joked that the book should be called Europe at Five Diapers a Day,” Pauline Frommer said.
Until the end of his life, he said he avoided traveling first class. “I fly economy class and I try to have the same form of travel, the same experience that the average American and the average citizen of the world has,” he said.
As Frommer aged, his daughter Pauline gradually became the force behind the company, promoting the brand, managing 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 an email to the AP in 2012: “It's wonderful to have a work partner whose mind is a steel trap and who is not only intelligent, but wisdom. His opinions, whether you agree with them or not, come from his social values. He is a man who places ethics at the center of his life and who integrates them into everything he does.
Besides Pauline, Frommer's survivors include his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld, and his two granddaughters.
