All stories about "Thomas Kohnstamm"

Mark Jolly, the founder of the luxury travel website, globorati and a writer for for Conde Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure, has been guest blogging for the NY Times' The Moment this week. A recent entry starts off as a condemnation of former travel writer Thomas Kohnstamm's new book about lying and cheating his way through the travel industry, and selling a few drugs in the meantime. Can Jolly relate? Not exactly. "Even during my lean years I never accepted a guidebook commission since the pay was always pitiful," he says. Duh, if Kohnstamm had just gotten a job with Conde Nast none of this ever would have happened. All the same, though, "the real shock is that [Kohnstamm's] the first to blow the whistle on the travel industry's dirty little secret."

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I received a review copy of Thomas Kohnstamm's Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? last week. You may recall that Kohnstamm's wild & woolly memoir concerns his questionable practices and enjoyably self-abusive lifestyle as a Lonely Planet guidebook writer. I fully intended to join the fray of the indignant travel-industrial complex, though of course my review would have been particularly witty, incisive, cutting, and revelatory. More importantly, I'd focus on the book itself, not on the lathered-up controversy regarding Kohnstamm's fictionalizing or plagiarizing his travel guide facts. Unfortunately, I lost my review copy on the train, so instead I'm just going to make it all up.

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Thomas Kohnstamm, the travel guide writer who made headlines recently after an Australian newspaper reported that he "plagiarised and made up large sections of his books," may not be the liar that many in the media (including yours truly) have made him out to be. I emailed with Kohnstamm this week to get his side of the story and he says he wasn't as dishonest as the press firestorm makes it seem. He claims the interview that sparked so much controversy took his statements out of context. Since Kohnstamm still does admit to cutting some corners in his work for guidebook publisher Lonely Planet, I'd take his claims with a grain of salt, but in the interests of fairness, I'm repeating them here.

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With the revelation earlier this week of the travel writer who failed to visit an entire country he needed to cover, the London Times steps in to arm its readers against hearsay advice -- but despite its title, "Which Guidebooks Can You Trust?" has less to do about which sources are downright unreliable and more to do with getting the best from all the information sources out there. True, there is a top 10 of guidebooks and web sites, but they aren't rated in reliability, just in overall goodness. The truth is that every source has its own unique way of sucking. (SqueakyMarmot/flickr)

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Over the weekend, travel guide publisher Lonely Planet was rocked by revelations that one of their writers lied, plagiarized, and dealt drugs while working for the company. The writer, a 32 year-old named Thomas Kohnstamm, gave an interview to Australia's Daily Telegraph newspaper, in which he admitted to making up large sections of Lonely Planet guides to Latin America and the Caribbean. Kohnstamm claims that, in one case, he didn't even travel to the country he was assigned to write about. He says he wrote the Lonely Planet guidebook for Colombia while in San Francisco, where he got information about the country "from a chick I was dating" who worked at the Consulate.

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