Author comes clean about travel guide writing

“Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism”

by Thomas Kohnstamm (Three Rivers Press, 288 pages, $13.95)

Thomas Kohnstamm is nobody’s model travel journalist, except maybe Hunter S. Thompson’s (if the latter is watching from beyond the gonzo grave).

“I’ve spent weeks on yachts for free,” writes the 32-year-old enfant terrible of his field, “been comped hotel rooms, meals, astronomical bar tabs, ski passes, paragliding classes, and scuba diving trips.”

Like Thompson, when Kohnstamm sits down to write, he’s not exactly devoted to straightforward reporting.

“In order to distill the chaos of life down to a clear narrative,” he says in his opening author’s note, “it was necessary to omit certain events, rearrange and compress chronology, and combine a few of the characters.

“I have changed most of the names and identifying details of the characters in this book to protect their privacy. Much of the dialogue and many e-mails have been re-created, but all are based on real conversations and correspondence.”

Why, then, is everyone in travel journalism posting and e-mailing about “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?”

Partly because it’s the best-written, funniest book of travel literature since “Phaic Tan” (say that quickly). But primarily because Kohnstamm has pulled back the curtain on the world of travel guides.

In his late 20s, Kohnstamm tells us, stuck in a soul-crushing job on Wall Street (helping lawyers find loopholes for white-collar criminals) and a crumbling relationship with his girlfriend, he accepted an offer from Lonely Planet, the hip Australian travel-guide company, to update its Brazil guide.

He also has contributed to a dozen of Lonely Planet’s Latin and South American titles. (Kohnstamm holds an M.A. in Latin American studies from Stanford University.)

Kohnstamm quickly discovered that publishers like Lonely Planet don’t pay their writers enough, leading them to cut corners.

In his own case, he’s said, he never bothered going to Colombia, writing his part of the Lonely Planet guide in San Francisco, thanks to help from a Colombian girlfriend.

In Brazil, after a cafe waitress invited the roguish, skirt-chasing author to come back after closing time, he had sex with her on a back table. He then wrote that the cafe is “a pleasant surprise” and “the table service is friendly.”

Kohnstamm admits to selling ecstasy along the way to bolster his low fee, and swapping freebies for favorable copy – a type of exchange that Lonely Planet explicitly bars.

Lonely Planet, founded in 1972 by Tony and Maureen Wheeler, has long been considered both a commercial hit (6 million guides sold yearly) and an artistic succes, with what even Kohnstamm acknowledges was an “alternative and gutsy persona.”

But the Wheelers last year sold 75 percent of the business to BBC Worldwide, the British broadcaster’s commercial arm, undercutting its countercultural image. And despite its prominent parent, Lonely Planet (unlike rival Rough Guides) does not pay royalties to its authors.

Several Lonely Planet writers have backed Kohnstamm’s claim that inadequate pay produces unacknowledged shortcuts.

Chris Taylor, who updated the line’s China guide in the 1990s, contended in the Melbourne Age newspaper that “underneath the self-promoting veneer of the guidebook industry, all kinds of things go wrong.”

Jeanne Oliver, who worked on European guides, called Kohnstamm’s revelations “a car crash waiting to happen.”

But travel journalist Jolyon Attwooll, writing in London’s Daily Telegraph, declared that the “vast majority of travel writers” feel great responsibility because they know someone “might just be relying on what I wrote.”

And Lonely Planet itself weighed in, denouncing Kohnstamm as an anomaly. Its publisher noted that Kohnstamm wrote only an intro to the Colombia book, which doesn’t require a field trip. Its chief executive promised to vet every book Kohnstamm worked on.

So is Kohnstamm the travel industry’s James Frey?

Not quite – after all, he outed himself. For readers, the key thing is that “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?” will leave you laughing most of the time, except when the author’s sexual swagger grows tiresome.

He’s proud that “up to now, no one has given voice to the everyday life of the gritty miners of travel information, those who dig up the material that is then polished and sold to consumers as Travel Gospel.”