Well, no, because it doesn’t exist. But if there were a hell, this one might go:
A Lonely Planet author says he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay, an Australian newspaper reported Sunday.
Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book on his misadventures, also said he didn’t travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because “they didn’t pay me enough,” The Daily Telegraph reported.
“I wrote the book in San Francisco [California],” he is quoted as saying in the Telegraph. “I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”
[ . . . ]
Kohnstamm has worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including its titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Chile and South America.
[ . . . ]
Kohnstamm’s book, “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism,” is set for release next week.
I’m a big fan of the LP series, but I’m not surprised by this – too many people putting together too much info for this not to happen. That said, they’ve never failed me in any substantial way – the closest was a completely wrong ferry schedule in Panama. And I should have checked with the ticket office, anyway.
Thanks to DT for sending this in.
(Huh. Interesting, the things you find when you search for your own entries. Here’s a story on the very same thing, using my LP bookshelf photo. And here’s someone who has decided to just cut and paste my entry on India into his or her blog.)
Beth
I wonder if he wrote the one on the Yucatan. It was so full of wrong information that we were safer doing the opposite of whatever it recommended. We never located a single one of the restaurants it recommended, although it had just been published the month before our trip, and it had egregious conversion errors — like saying things cost 45 pesos when it was actually 45 dollars, and vice versa.
We broke up with LP on that trip.
MB
I’ve strayed from LP from time to time. Not because of any bad experience, but rather trying to avoid the LP effect. You know, where all the backpackers in town end up at the same (previously) local spot because of its inclusion in the most recent edition?
So I’ve tried out Moon, Rough Guides, etc. But I keep coming back to LP.
For an interesting perspective on Kohnstamm’s claims, check this out. Comes from a writer who’s worked for LP, Moon, and Rough Guides.