Gadling

In light of the recent news surrounding Thomas Kohnstamm, contributing author for Lonely Planet’s Colombia, and his fabrication of the guidebook, I decided to weed through the reviews on Amazon and see what people had to say. It wasn’t hard to find a bad one; out 16 total reviews, 14 were given only 1 star. Here are a handful of them:

“I have been a lonely planet guide book fan for many years. Unfortunately, this one is a big disappointment. I doubt the writer spent much time in the country. The info on Medellin is practically non existent. If they even bothered to read wikipedia, they could have provided 100x more info.” — San Diego Guy

“I started in Ipiales, worked my way up to Cartegena and back down to Bogota. There were the usually small errors, but by the time I reached Mompos, I wondered if the authors had visited Colombia recently.” — David Mellinger — Short answer: no!

“This guide does little more than repeat SOME of what the previous guide did. Most likely the writer just checked out phone numbers, maybe eliminated those that did not respond.” — Col

“Go to wikipedia online and you will find out a lot more than reading this book!” — Jack

I wonder if any of the contributing authors actually visited Colombia?

Thomas Kohnstamm wrote the History, Culture, Environment and Food & Drink chapters.

This weekend, news broke of the Lonely Planet writer, Thomas Kohnstamm, who admitted he fabricated portions of his guidebook coverage, and we’ve had several contributers — both Gadling writers and our faithful readers — weighing in with their opinion.

Aaron gave us 5 reasons to be outraged by this news, while Jeff White was doubtful of the legitimacy of guidebooks from the beginning. Matthew Firestone — a guidebook author for Lonely Planet and Gadling contributer — reminds us that not all LP authors are like this.

But it turns out Kohnstamm himself isn’t even like this. His supposed unethical, stick-it-to-the-man, “they didn’t pay me enough to go” actions of not even visiting the country in which he was writing about was a sham, too.

This article from the Guardian suggests that Kohnstamm — in the guidebook publisher’s defense — “was hired to write about the country’s history and not to travel there to review accommodation and restaurants.”

Just another example of Kohnstamm blowing things out of proportion for the sake of shilling his own book — all at the expense of Lonely Planet, their dedicated staff of writers, and the millions of guidebook readers throughout the world.

“It was expected I would never go to Colombia,” he added.

We have a few other Lonely Planet authors on the Gadling team, so expect to hear from them, too.