Lonely Planet Joins The Hotel Booking Game

by Josh Lew on

Since it was sold to the BBC, everybody’s favorite guidebook company has had uncertainty looming in its future. The brand took a step away from its paper-and-binding roots recently by signing a deal with Expedia and Hostelworld. The trio will join forces to provide an online hotel booking service.

Lonely Planet will put all those hotel reviews it has in its vaults to good use, while Expedia and Hostelworld will provide the nuts-and-bolts.

The move is good for LP. They are actively bringing the brand to an online audience, and by doing so, are ensuring their survival in a world populated by websites featuring user-generated travel reviews and tips. With guidebook writers already scouring the globe and bringing back write-ups about hotels, guest houses and hostels, it shouldn’t drain the budget too much.

Expedia might also come out well in the deal. They are a giant among booking sites, but perhaps not much of a player when it comes to the backpacking set. By working with LP, they will gain exposure to a new group of customers.

Hostelworld and Lonely Planet are a match made in backpacker heaven. The budget accommodation booking service gets to put its name next to two of travel’s biggest, LP gets the technical side of the venture taken care of without having to break a sweat, and Expedia, like I mentioned above, gets some exposure in a new demographic.

No word on when the service will be up and running, but I’m sure quite a few people are holding their breath in anticipation.

Photo from Flickr user ChihPing

Lonely Planet opens first brick & mortar store

by Grant Martin on

The ubiquitous Lonely Planet guides have finally outgrown the dusty shelves of your local book store and have evolved into their own brand.

Sydney International airport will be the new home of Lonely Planet’s first concept store, hosting a wealth of guidebooks, LP branded gear and other hobnobbery catering to a travelers whims. I suppose this location does make sense: Australia is home to the guidebooks and where else are you going to find more travelers than in an airport terminal?

Soon, you too will be craving those Lonely Planet fanny packs and visors as you check out the tour group of 70 elderley people herding past you at the Acropolis. Soon you can look down at your peers who only wear “Frommers” underwear because you know all of the chicks only dig LP boxer briefs.

You’re going to have to wait until sometime next year though — renovations are still underway in Sydney and its going to be another 12 months or so before the LP store is up and running. And after that? Who knows, there may be a store in your local mall within a year.

No word yet either on how much the autographed photos of Matthew Firestone and Willy Volk will cost nor whether the action figures will be anatomically correct. I hear they’re all sold out until 2014 anyway.

Talking travel with the notorious Thomas Kohnstamm

by Jerry Guo on

Thomas Kohnstamm is the author of this year’s most talked about (i.e. controversial) travel memoir, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?,The book centers around his recent days as a Lonely Planet writer on assignment in Brazil–shortly after its release earlier this year, press reports surfaced all around the world that he supposedly admitted to plagiarizing large chunks of his Lonely Planet write-ups and accepted freebies.

Here to set the record straight is the guy himself (oh, and he also happens to be an accomplished writer and traveler).

When’d you get your first passport stamp? Looking back, how do you feel about those earlier, carefree days of traveling? (Before you went pro)

United Kingdom (Gatwick Airport), summer 1989. As a kid, I traveled a lot with my family. We would take long overland trips through Europe and North Africa, staying in hostels, renting short-term apartments and camping. I did my first solo trip at age 17, worked as a volunteer interpreter at the Folklife Festival of the Pyrenees and then ended up traveling around Spain with a bunch of Germans in an old Mercedes ambulance. I loved travel then and I still love travel now, but, back then, things were on a slower pace so I could enjoy the details a bit more.
How’d you land your first LP gig? In your book, it seemed like you suddenly got an envelope while working on Wall Street inviting you to be a travel writer. But you must’ve paid your dues somehow?

In the book I discuss how I had written a phrasebook for Lonely Planet in the late 90s, right after I finished college. I studied Spanish and Portuguese since I was young and had been working as a guide in Costa Rica. I noticed that LP only had a single phrasebook for Latin American Spanish. There is a staggering difference between, say, Argentine Spanish, Cuban Spanish and different types of Central American Spanish, so I came up with the idea to write a specific Costa Rican Spanish Phrasebook. After selling the book to LP, my career took a few different turns, but I still had some contacts at LP when I later looked into travel writing gigs.

How much do you rely on other travel guides when you’re on assignment?

I didn’t rely on them at all during guidebook assignments. You have so much to do and so little time that you are mainly following the last edition of the Lonely Planet. I sometimes looked at other books to see if they had coverage of a town or some other destinations that seemed worth including, but usually LP was more comprehensive than the others in the first place. I don’t write guidebooks any more, but I would assume that blogs and wiki-travel sites are outpacing other guidebooks in terms of providing new information.

Why Lonely Planet? What do you see as the downsides of Fodor’s, Frommers, and Rough Guides?

I have said a number of times that I think that Lonely Planet makes some of the best guidebooks out there and that I still use LP. I was not out to get Lonely Planet. I was simply writing about my experience as a guidebook writer. That said, I see inherent flaws in all guidebooks. My point in my book is that guidebooks should not be followed slavishly or treated as “The Bible” as they are essentially subjective and much of their information is included on a somewhat arbitrary basis.

Lonely Planet still makes a big deal of their “we don’t accept freebies” policy. However, in your book, you seemed to play a bit fast-and-loose with that rule. What’s your take on the policy (NYT Travel section has a strict
“if-you’ve-ever-accepted-freebies-you-can-never-even-write-for-us rule”)? And can you clarify what happened with your LP assignments on that respect?

Lonely Planet states that their writers “don’t accept freebies in exchange for positive coverage.” That is different from “don’t accept freebies” period. That reads to me as no quid pro quo, which is the guidebook industry standard. People can be as sanctimonious as they like, but I know what really happens when guidebook writers are trying to cover so much ground with so little time and so little money. I am just the first to be honest about it. And, as Rick Steves said, if you stay in a hotel you may come away with a worse impression than you would have if you were just there for a ten-minute run through. Maybe you’d notice that there are cockroaches in the bathroom at night or that the train passes right behind the building every couple of hours.

I never set out to accept freebies or discounts. As a matter of fact, you will see in my book that I avoided them until I realized that I needed them in order to be able to complete the massive amount of research. Again, I have never made any sort of direct exchange of a freebie or discount for positive coverage and I say that explicitly in my book.

As for the NYT, I think that their policy is fair. Guidebooks and travel journalism are really different animals and the research processes can barely even be compared.

And just to get this out of the way, can you explain, for the last time to put this to rest, the allegations that you “plagiarized” chunks of your travel writing text. Did you rather mean that you based your research off other guides rather than literally cut-and-paste?

I never plagiarized anything in my life and I never claimed to plagiarize anything. I never based my research off of any other guides. All of the media controversy was based on a sensationalist article from an Australian tabloid that invented the idea that I had claimed to have “plagiarized and made up large sections of [my] books.”
The words “plagiarize” and “make up” were stripped out of a tongue-in-cheek sentence towards the end of my book. The full line reads:

I should be able to write some decent introductions and establish a sense of the place that conveys why a traveler might actually want to visit a destination. That’ll have to be enough-even if I don’t get all of the mundane opening hours and hotel prices right. When it comes to those details, what I can’t plagiarize, I can always make up.

Unfortunately, the journalist used the words like a print version of a sound bite and they were then repeated out of context across news wires and then the blogosphere. Talk about fabrication.

In writing this book, I was impressed by your descriptions of place and characters. How’d you capture that? Did you take extensive notes or did you rely on memory when you were typing out the manuscript?

I do have pretty solid notes, but I rely mainly on my memory. People can say what they will about me, but I do have a good memory.

How do you find that to-be-discovered “it” destination, the place that hasn’t been gushed over in a travel guide. Is your most important source local knowledge? Or is it Internet forums, blogs, etc?

I am a traditionalist on that front, so I use a combination of local knowledge and talking to other travelers on the road. I think that a big part of being a travel writer is being a bit of an extrovert and just talking to as many people as possible and keeping track of when you hear about the same place a few times from different people who aren’t connected to each other.

What are your must-carry travel accessories?

Chapstick, sunglasses, and, these days, (unfortunately) a laptop. I also like to stash some extra $20 bills here and there in case of emergencies.

Any tips to booking cheap flights? How do you go about it?

I usually use kayak.com. Am not much of an expert on cheap flights. I do my best to use miles when possible.

Can you give us a preview of your next book?

It is about a period of time when I thought that I had a Patagonian love child with the drummer of an all-female Chilean punk band. I tried to give up travel writing and step up to the responsibilities of international illegitimate fatherhood — with decidedly mixed results.

GADLING TAKE 5: Week of 4-18-2008

by Catherine Bodry on

I suppose this week will go down in travel-writing history as the week of the TKA. In case you’ve been at the South Pole all week, that would be the Thomas Kohnstamm affair. The whole fiasco prompted all stages of grief in the travel-writing world: shock, denial, anger, despair, and, finally, acceptance — sort of. Aaron, Jeffrey and Justin covered the scandal, and if you’d like a play-by-play, read the following posts:

Other stuff happened this week, too. Here are a few examples:

Hope you have a scandal-free weekend.

Does Thomas Kohnstamm deserve an apology?

by Aaron Hotfelder on

In an interview posted late yesterday at World Hum, Lonely Planet author Thomas Kohnstamm explains how he’s unwittingly found himself at the center of an unexpected controversy.

The author, who was quoted by dozens of newspapers over the weekend admitting to all kinds of guidebook-writing malfeasance, says that the situation has been “blown way out of proportion.” In fact, Kohnstamm claims, he wasn’t guilty of anything besides accepting a few comps and doing a bit of hotel and restaurant research on the internet instead of in person.

Several days ago, before the World Hum interview, I wrote an oft-cited post calling Kohnstamm a fraud and expressing outrage at his behavior. Now that Kohnstamm has backtracked from his previous statements, does he deserve an apology?

Well, yes and no. Kohnstamm certainly was not guilty of all the charges leveled at him, and some of the criticism he received was unfair. He doesn’t appear to be a massive plagiarizer of the Jayson Blair ilk, and I’d wager he’s far from the devil he’s been made out to be, here and elsewhere. Also, it probably would have been prudent for me to contact him before writing the “fraud” post to see if he was quoted correctly, even though he doesn’t dispute that he was.

With all that said, it’s hard to muster much sympathy for Kohnstamm, since he was the one responsible for bringing up these charges in the first place. He repeatedly gave his interviewer the impression that he was a veritable “bad boy” of travel writing, saying, for example, of his agreement with Lonely Planet regarding the Colombia guidebook:

“They didn’t pay me enough to go (to) Colombia. I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating-an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”

Clearly, Kohnstamm’s implication is that he was supposed to visit Colombia, but the misers at Lonely Planet were too cheap to make it worthwhile. Turns out, as Justin reported yesterday, Kohnstamm and LP agreed that he wouldn’t visit Colombia, as he was responsible only for writing the history, environment, food and drink, and culture sections of the book. So why make that explicit to the interviewer? Easy: because that’s not interesting, and it doesn’t move books.

Now, Kohnstamm is calling his Colombia claim “regrettable” and “an unfortunate choice of words.” Hard to argue with that.

His situation now is a bit like that of the college guy on Spring Break who lies to his buddies, telling them that he cheated on his girlfriend with a gorgeous, blonde 19-year-old. When the news eventually makes it back to the girlfriend– as it always does– he’s in the unenviable position of having to explain that before he was lying, but now he’s telling the truth.

As for the claim that he accepted “comps” from hotels and restaurants, he says that’s true, but he tried to avoid doing it as much as possible. Frankly, I can’t work up much outrage over this, and I’d never condemn a guidebook author for taking a discount here and there– as long as they aren’t in exchange for positive reviews. Kohnstamm is right that these guys don’t get paid much, and hell, I’d probably take a discount or two myself. (Gadling credentials, anyone?)

All this doesn’t leave me feeling as if I have much to apologize for, I must say. Look back at my original post, and I’ll stand by what I wrote: Self-promotion? Entitlement? Decreasing the reputation of LP and its hard-working writers? As Elvis used to say, I’ll take all of the above with a side order of more.

But wait, does Kohnstamm even want an apology? Probably not. He just wants everybody to forget about this. But oh yeah, remember to buy his book.