Arthur Frommer, "who expanded the horizons of postwar Americans and virtually invented the low-budget travel industry with his seminal guidebook, Europe on 5 Dollars a Day: A Guide to Inexpensive Travel, which introduced millions to an experience once considered the exclusive domain of the wealthy," died November 18, the New York Times reported. He was 95.
First published in 1957, Europe on 5 Dollars a Day sold millions of copies and was updated until 2007, when its name was Europe from $95 a Day. Frommer built on the book's success by offering other guidebooks, package tours, hotel deals, and more.
"His earnest prose, alternately lyrical and artless but always compulsively informative, conveyed a near-missionary zeal for travel and elevated Frommer's from the how-to genre to the kind of book that could change a person's worldview," the Times wrote.
"This is a book," he wrote, "for American tourists who a) own no oil wells in Texas, b) are unrelated to the Aga Khan, c) have never struck it rich in Las Vegas and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation."
Frommer considered budget travelers better U.S. ambassadors to Europeans and likely learned more and had a more enjoyable time than affluent travelers. He had a few simple rules:
"Never travel first class. (If going by boat, consider freighters.) Pack lightly enough to be free from porters, taxi drivers and bellhops. Stay in pensions; take the room without the bath. Eat in restaurants patronized by locals. Try to engage locals in conversation. Study maps. Take public transportation. Buy a Eurail pass."
By 1977, when he sold his publishing operations to Simon & Schuster, he offered budget guides to New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Mexico, the Caribbean, Hawaii, Japan and 300 other destinations. (Today the Frommer enterprise says it has sold more than 75 million books and has 130 active titles, available in print and in e-books, the Times noted.)
After the sale, Frommer remained chairman and president of Arthur Frommer International Inc., which included a large wholesale tour operation and eventually the online consumer travel site frommers.com. John Wiley & Sons acquired the company in 2001 and sold it to Google in 2012.
In 2013, eight months after it was sold, Frommer bought the Frommer brand name back from Google and announced plans to publish a new series of guidebooks--both digitally and on paper--under a new company name, FrommerMedia, which continues to operate.
Roger Dow, the former CEO of the United States Travel Association, said in an interview that "before him, the average American just did not go to Europe, or much of anywhere else overseas. This guy single-handedly opened up that prospect to a huge new population."