Remembering Arthur

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In 2007, Arthur Frommer was one of the participants in a roundtable for Travel Weekly on the future of travel guidebooks.
In 2007, Arthur Frommer was one of the participants in a roundtable for Travel Weekly on the future of travel guidebooks. Photo Credit: Lisa Quiñones/Black Star
Arnie Weissmann
Arnie Weissmann

As a 19-year-old, I took a year off from college to work as a waiter and, when I had saved enough money, flew to Europe.  In my backpack was "Europe on $10 and $15 a Day," by Arthur Frommer. (Inflation had already taken its toll on the original "Europe on $5 a Day" edition.)

By that point, Frommer had already begun contracting with other writers to expand his growing collection of guidebooks, but he still updated Europe himself.

Heeding his advice, I: 

  • Went to Zermatt, Switzerland, to see the Matterhorn. 
  • Stopped in at one of the tattoo studios lining the docks of Copenhagen. The artist charged by the letter; a true budget traveler, I had only enough money to have the first three letters of my name inked onto my arm.
  • Lingered long at Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam -- as I recall, Frommer had written more than two pages just on that painting, ending with, "And before you leave the museum, go back and look at it again."

Eleven years later, I had started my own destination information service, Weissmann Travel Reports (now incorporated into Travel42, owned by Travel Weekly parent company Northstar Travel Group).

Frommer's published for consumers, but my model was business-to-business, and I frequently participated in trade shows where travel advisors gathered. I was manning a booth in McCormick Place in Chicago when a woman peered up at my sign, checked a sheet of paper in her hand, and approached. "Arthur Frommer would like you to be a guest on his television show."

I was excited to meet Arthur. In the greenroom, I sat with his other guest for the show, Chicago's then-mayor Richard M. Daley who, cramming for his appearance, grilled me on some travel-related topics.

When it was my turn to go on, Arthur gave a most generous interview, filled with kind words about my service and its content. I was jubilant.

It wasn't long after that that I spoke with some travel advisors who saw him more as a villain than a hero. He had started a tour operation that went under, and travel advisors were left to deal with upset clients. While I sympathized with the advisors, I also believed that, on balance, he had done a lot more to help the travel industry than hurt it. 

Over the next decades, I would run into him at various conferences and visited him in his Empire State Building office after he launched Budget Travel magazine.

If being on his show was an early highlight of my career, it would be topped 17 years later in 2007 when I organized a roundtable for Travel Weekly on the future of travel guidebooks.

Arthur accepted my invitation to participate, as did Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler, Zagat Guides' Tim Zagat,Tripadvisor founder Steve Kaufer and "1,000 Places to See Before You Die" author Patricia Schultz.

Over the years, I had gravitated to Lonely Planet guidebooks for my own travels but still held Arthur in very high regard. I was unaware that he and Wheeler had never met before, and I considered it a great honor to introduce them to one another.

The subsequent conversation was lively, with Arthur and Zagat getting into a heated argument over the wisdom of the guru vs. the wisdom of the crowd (Arthur was, not surprisingly, on the side of gurus).

Despite some testy exchanges between them, toward the end of the roundtable Zagat admitted he got into his business because "I wanted to be just like Arthur Frommer." Similar to Arthur, Zagat was a Yale-educated lawyer who initially began self-publishing guides as a side business.

Wheeler and his wife, Maureen, also self-published and initially considered Lonely Planet a hobby. "We started with much the same sort of view that Arthur did, the main difference being that we started in a different part of the world," he said.

At a table of ostensible peers and rivals, it became clear that Frommer was the godfather.

And that Frommer's guidebooks are still being published 17 years later validates my observation at the time that there will always be a place for both the wise amateur and the wizened expert.

When it comes to travel in particular, I'm more inclined to opt for the wizened expert. Arthur's advice could not be boiled down to ratings. "Rijksmuseum *****" would not have given me a lifelong appreciation for Rembrandt, as his "The Night Watch" commentary did.

In 2015, I successfully nominated Arthur for the World Travel Market World Travel Leaders Award. After he received it, we celebrated with our wives at L'autre, a Mexican-Polish restaurant with a French name in London. I chose it in part because to me it symbolized the cross-cultural bridges that Arthur had helped millions to cross.

With his death, a unique voice guiding the multitudes across those bridges has gone silent. It will be missed.

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