Lonely Planet travel writer tells newspaper he never visited a county he wrote about
A CNN report says that 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.
Lonely Planet publishes more than 500 titles and employs 300 authors, according to its Web site.
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.”
The 32-year-old Seattle, Washington, native also claims he accepted free travel, which is a violation of the company’s policy.
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.
An e-mail from Lonely Planet said Kohnstamm’s book were being reviewed, the newspaper reported.
“If we find that the content has been compromised, we’ll take urgent steps to fix it.” “Once we’ve got things right for travelers as quickly as we can, we’ll look at what we do and how we do it to ensure as best we can that this type of thing never happens again,” the e-mail said, according to the newspaper.
The book’s publisher, Piers Pickard, told the paper that an “urgent” review of Kohnstamm’s books did not reveal any inaccuracies.
The Lonely Planet series publishes 500 titles, updated every two to four years, and employs 300 authors, according to the company’s Web site. It sells more than 6 million guides a year, the newspaper reported.
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.
On his MySpace page, Kohnstamm says the book “is about the decision to abandon Manhattan to try to make it as a travel writer and the good, the bad and the really surreal that I experienced on the road.”
A Report by The Mole from CNN
John Alwyn-Jones
Vegas’s Billion-Dollar Secrets – What They Don’t Want Tourists to Know
Visit Florida’s New CEO Bryan Griffin Shares His Vision for State Tourism with Graham
Chicago’s Tourism Renaissance: Graham Interviews Kristin Reynolds of Choose Chicago
Graham Talks with Cassandra McCauley of MMGY NextFactor About the Latest Industry Research
Destination International’s Andreas Weissenborn: Research, Advocacy, and Destination Impact
Graham and Don Welsh Discuss the Success of Destinations International’s Annual Conference
Graham and CEO Andre Kiwitz on Ventura Travel’s UK Move and Recruitment for the Role
Brett Laiken and Graham Discuss Florida’s Tourism Momentum and Global Appeal
Graham and Elliot Ferguson on Positioning DC as a Cultural and Inclusive Global Destination
Graham Talks to Fraser Last About His England-to-Ireland Trek for Mental Health Awareness
Kathy Nelson Tells Graham About the Honour of Hosting the World Cup and Kansas City’s Future
Graham McKenzie on Sir Richie Richardson’s Dual Passion for Golf and His Homeland, Antigua
ADS PRO 
Phocuswright reveals the world's largest travel markets in volume in 2025
Higher departure tax and visa cost, e-arrival card: Japan unleashes the fiscal weapon against tourists
Cyclone in Sri Lanka had limited effect on tourism in contrary to media reports
Singapore to forbid entry to undesirable travelers with new no-boarding directive
Euromonitor International unveils world’s top 100 city destinations for 2025