Through my websites, people have bought hundreds, perhaps thousands of Lonely Planet guidebooks. They reinvented the genre, in my opinion. Never buy any other company without first comparing against LP.
Sadly, for the past 6-7 years I’ve started to notice problems.
LP author Thomas Kohnstamm has a new book coming out this week:
THE Lonely Planet guidebook empire is reeling from claims by one of its authors that he plagiarised and made up large sections of his books and dealt drugs to make up for poor pay.
Thomas Kohnstamm also claims in a book that he accepted free travel, in contravention of the Melbourne-based company’s policy.
His revelations have rocked the travel publisher, which sells more than six million guides a year – guides that generations of tourists have come to rely on.
Mr Kohnstamm, whose book is titled Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? said yesterday that he had worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including their titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, South America, Venezuela and Chile.
In one case, he said he had not even visited the country he wrote about.
“They didn’t pay me enough to go Colombia,” he said.
“I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating – an intern in the Colombian consulate. …
These days I am more likely to buy from other companies: Moon and Footprint, for two.
BBC recently purchased controlling interest in Lonely Planet. BBC has their own problems, however. I’m not sure LP can recover.
Rick McCharles 