Arthur Frommer, whose “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” guidebooks revolutionized leisure travel by convincing average Americans to take budget vacations abroad, has died. He was 95 years old.
Frommer died of complications from pneumonia, his daughter Pauline Frommer said Monday.
“My dad opened up the world to a lot of people,” she said. “He deeply believed that travel could be an enlightenment and a work that didn’t require a big budget.”
Frommer began writing about travel in the 1950s while serving in the US Army in Europe. When a guidebook he wrote for American soldiers stationed overseas sold out, he launched one of the travel industry’s best-known brands in 1957, “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day.”
“It took off and became an instant bestseller,” he recalled in a 2007 interview with The Associated Press on the 50th anniversary of the book’s debut.
Frommer’s brand, led today by his daughter Pauline, is one of the most recognizable names in the travel industry, with guidebooks to destinations around the world, an influential social media presence, podcasts and a radio station. Shows are included.
Frommer’s philosophy—staying in inns and budget hotels instead of five-star hotels, exploring on your own using public transportation, eating with locals in small cafes instead of fancy restaurants—reformed Americans in the mid-to-late 20th century. Changed the style of travel. He said budget travel is preferable to luxury travel “because it leads to a more authentic experience.” This message encouraged average people, not just the rich, to vacation abroad.
It didn’t hurt that his books hit the market because the rise of jet travel made it easier to get to Europe than it was to cross the Atlantic by ship. These books became so popular that there was a time when you couldn’t visit a place like the Eiffel Tower without seeing Frommer’s guidebooks in the hands of every other American tourist.
Frommer’s advice has also become so standard it’s hard to remember how radical it seemed in the days before discount flights and backpacks. “It was a really important thing,” 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 all about the ruins of a church or a temple. But the idea that you wanted to eat somewhere and find a hotel or a Want to go from B – Well, I’ve got a lot of respect for Arthur.
“Arthur did for travel what Consumer Reports did for everything else,” said Pete Carriere, former owner of The Globe Corner, a travel bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The last edition of Frommer’s groundbreaking series was titled “Europe for $95 a Day”. The concept no longer made sense when hotels could not be found for less than $100 a night, so the chain was discontinued in 2007. But the Frommer publishing empire didn’t end, though, as sales began when Frommer sold the guidebook company. Simon & Schuster. It was later acquired by Wiley Publishing, which sold it to Google in 2012. Google quietly shut down the guidebooks, but Arthur Frommer — in a David vs. Goliath triumph — took his brand back from Google. In November 2013, along with his daughter Pauline, he relaunched the print series with dozens of new guidebook titles.
“I never thought at my age I’d be working so hard,” he told the AP at age 84.
Frommer also remained a prominent figure in 21st-century travel, speaking on his blog and radio show toward the end of his career. He hated mega-cruise ships and railed against travel websites where users post their own reviews, saying they were too easily manipulated with fake postings. And he coined the phrase “Trump Slump” in a widely-quoted column that predicted a drop in tourism to the U.S. after Donald Trump was elected president.
Frommer was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, and grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, during 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. 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 after graduating 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 heating up.
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 would hop on a train to Paris or take an Air Force flight to England. He eventually wrote “The GI’s Guide to Traveling in Europe,” and a few weeks before his military assignment, he had 5,000 copies printed by a typesetter in a German village. They cost 50 cents a piece, distributed by the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes.
Shortly after returning to New York to practice law at the Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison firm, he received a cable from Europe. “The book is sold out, can I arrange a reprint?” he said.
A civilian version of the guide was created soon after when he took his month off from the law firm. “In 30 days I went to 15 different cities, getting up at 4 in the morning, running around the streets, trying to find good cheap hotels and restaurants,” he recalled.
The resulting book, the very first “5 Dollars a Day on Europe,” was much more than a list. It was written with a wide-eyed wonder that bordered on poetry: “Venus is a wonderful dream,” wrote Frommer. “Try to arrive at night when the wonders of the city steal away from you little by little. … In the dark, tiny clusters of candy-striped poles are visible. A gondola with a bright lantern hanging from its side. comes closer.”
Eventually Frommer gave up the law to write guides full-time. Daughter Pauline joined him on his tours with his first wife, Hope Arthur, beginning in 1965, when she was 4 months old. “He used to joke that the book should be called ‘Europe on Five Diapers a Day,'” said Pauline Frommer.
In the 1960s, when inflation forced Frommer to change the book’s title to “Europe on 5 and 10 Dollars a Day,” he said, “It was as if someone had stabbed me in the head. “
Asked to summarize the impact of his books in a 2017 Associated Press interview, he said that in the 1950s, “most Americans were taught that foreign travel was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, Especially traveling to Europe. They were taught that it was dangerous to stay in anything but a high-end restaurant in a war-torn country … and I knew all these warnings were a lot of nonsense.
He added: “We were also at the forefront of suggesting that a different kind of American should travel, that you don’t have to be well-heeled.”
Towards the end of his life, he said he avoided traveling first class. “I fly economy class and I try to experience 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 a force behind the company, promoting the brand, managing the business and even writing some content based on her travels. Her relationship with her father was tender and respectful, and she summed it up in a 2012 email to the AP: “It’s great to have a working partner with a mind of steel. , and one who has not only intelligence, but wisdom whose opinions, whether you agree with them or not, come from his social values is a man who places morality at the center of his life. And binds them in everything he does.”
In addition to Pauline, Frommer is survived by his second wife, Roberta Broadfield, and four grandchildren.
