TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 5

newspaper travel sections were plump with advertisements. By the 1970s, industries in
the travel and tourism complex were the single largest source of advertising for Americ-
an newspapers. Americans were mostly traveling in one direction—across the Atlantic and
discovering Europe. And they were spending a lot of money.
Many were carrying a thin red book called Europe on $5 a Day. The author was Arthur
Frommer, an American G.I. turned lawyer turned publisher. His success exemplified the
potential of tourism that the fledgling U.N. organization was trying to capture.
Frommer's book offered Americans the possibility of traveling through Europe in a few
weeks rather than the months required in another era and at the same time of enjoying
three-course French meals without breaking their budgets. Frommer told me he figured
out “how to travel cheaply” when he was stationed in Berlin after World War II. “Before,
only the elite could afford to go to Europe, make the grand tour. No one cared about the
poor slob who had never traveled before,” said Mr. Frommer in his sun-filled Manhattan
apartment, where topics and curios cover every surface.
Now a legend—the Walter Cronkite of tourist guidebooks—Frommer consciously
began writing as the champion of people who thought they couldn't afford to travel. He
was drafted into the U.S. Army straight out of Yale Law School and trained as an infantry-
man to fight in the Korean War, but his orders were amended and he was sent to Europe
to work in intelligence. Stationed in war-scarred Berlin, Frommer used his fluent Russian
and French at work, and then on the weekends as he mastered the skill of catching free
rides on military planes to travel the continent. “I was a poor boy from the United States
and here I was flying all over Europe,” he said. He still remembers his first freshly baked
croissant and Spanish paella. After watching Frommer hitching rides to London, Stock-
holm, Barcelona, Venice and Paris, all on the pay of a lowly G.I., a few of his friends in the
barracks asked Frommer to explain how he got to travel so much while they were stuck in
Germany. His answer was The G.I.'s Guide to Travelling in Europe , written in stilted milit-
ary jargon. The initial run of 10,000 copies of The G.I.'s Guide sold out in one afternoon.
Frommer had discovered what was critical to modern travel writing and decided to
write a guidebook for civilians, as he put it, once he was out of the service. Above all, most
people wanted help mastering the logistics of travel—airplanes, ships, hotels, restaurants,
visas, traveler's checks. What they saw once they arrived in the country was almost second-
ary. In a sense, Frommer reversed the order of the travel topics that had come before him.
Or as he told me, “People weren't looking for a big travel book with a thorough explana-
tion of a country's history and culture that would stay on their book shelves for years. They
wanted a guide.”
His ambitions were focused: he wanted to show the masses how to travel without break-
ing the bank. “I wanted everyone to be able to experience different cultures, to confront
opposite views, to celebrate the world's diversities,” he said, remembering the purity of his
intentions. Frommer's timing was impeccable. The American middle classes had begun to