Lonely Travel's Nasty Surprise

Posted on April 13, 2008

This is some very bad news for travel publisher Lonely Planet. One of the firm's travel writers, Thomas Kohnstamm, admits in a new book that he never even went to some of the countries he reviewed, that he made up most of what he wrote and that he plagiarized the rest. It's an absolute shocker to the company who has rushed to review and edit all of the books he worked on. He also dealt drugs on the side to offset his low salary and accepted free travel, in contravention of company rules.

News.com.au reports that Kohnstamm wrote a travel guide for Lonely Planet about Colombia even though he had never been to the country!

Kohnstamm says, "They didn't pay me enough to go Colombia. I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating -- an intern in the Colombian Consulate. They don't pay enough for what they expect the authors to do."

As to the question posed by Kohnstamm's book, Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism, we're thinking the answer is an enthusiastic yes. At least in his case. What an amazing liar he is! We're also betting that half of his wild "adventures in hedonism" in his new book are as fictional as the travel guides he wrote.