This spring he bought his brand back from Google. Doug Mack pays tribute to the erudite travel icon:
Organizers of the Marshall Plan had encouraged middle-class Americans to travel to Europe as part of the rebuilding effort, but it was Frommer who told budget travelers how, exactly, to realize their Continental dreams, offering the guidance and reassurance that pushed them out the door. Earlier travel guides, such as Fielding’s and Fodor’s, had been aimed squarely at the steamer-trunk tourists, the elites who could afford to cross the ocean before the advent of commercial long-haul flights in 1958. The books’ highbrow tones and hefty weights matched their recommended daily budgets, dense with flowery digressions like the extended rumination on French wallpaper that Fodor included in his first Europe guide, in 1936. Europe on Five Dollars a Day marked a different approach, egalitarian through and through, from its budget to its pithy, straightforward prose—a self-help manual of sorts, starting with its descriptive, proudly populist title.
Mr. Frommer and his guidebooks over the years
Think of Julia Child and how Mastering the Art of French Cooking changed the collective outlook on cooking, making it more accessible. That’s what Arthur Frommer did for European travel, showing the average American that this aspirational experience was, in fact, within reach. And in doing so, he created mass tourism as we know it.
