Arthur Frommer, the man who sent a generation of middle-class Americans to Europe 40 years ago by penning Europe on $5 a Day, this week launched Outspoken Online Encyclopedia. The Web site, part of Macmillan Online, brings together "a lifetime of travel experience" in the form of 6,000 pages of searchable information, and a daily newsletter the 67-year-old writer has agreed to publish "as long as I'm living, seven times a week."
"Travel has become so complex lately - you have travel fares that change hourly, destinations that are putting on every sort of incentive ... The only way you can get good information is by being able to go - knowing how to go - into the Internet," says Frommer, who sees the Net as his next logical step, in keeping with his lifetime message of individual empowerment.
Stationed in Berlin during the Korean War, Frommer began to travel around. His experiences led to the publication of Europe on $5 a Day. The idea fit the imagination and prosperity of a newly affluent American society, and his publications grew to the current level of 180 books.
Before Europe on $5 a Day, "the entire American travel industry preached the message that if you were to travel internationally you had to do it in a first-class way, otherwise it would be dangerous, unclean, or unsafe," Frommer said. He found, however, that the less he spent, the more fun and authentic his experiences were, and the greater the learning experience.
Today he finds himself again at odds with prevalent views of travel professionals. "My view that the Internet is becoming the most important source of travel information, reservations, and bookings is sharply at variance with the opinions of most travel professionals," Frommer says. "There's not a week that goes by in the trade press that some skeptic isn't saying it's all nonsense. This is like people in the '50s who predicted that television had no future."
