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enjoy two-week paid vacations, an idea first instituted by the French in 1936. And private
airline companies were offering passage across the Atlantic at prices the middle class could
afford, sort of. “But there weren't enough travel topics back then to ill half a shelf in a
standard bookstore,” said Mr. Frommer.
To write his first book Frommer scouted Europe for bargain hotels, cafés, restaurants
and boat trips and wrote it all up in clear, simple itineraries punctuated by lush descrip-
tions of the glorious sights of medieval and Renaissance cities that sparked his uncritical
love affair with travel. In one of his favorite passages, he describes Venice at night: “As you
chug along, little clusters of candy-striped mooring poles emerge from the dark, a gon-
dola approaches with a lighted lantern hung from its prow. The reflection of a slate-gray
church, bathed in blue spotlight, shimmers in the water as you pass by. This is the sheerest
beauty and a sight that no one should miss.”
Europe on $5 a Day
was published in 1960, and its modest first run of 5,000 copies
also sold out in a single day. Frommer quit his day job at a prestigious Manhattan law firm
to start his own publishing company and launch a movement. His style of providing the
mundane details of where to stay and what to eat with an overlay of rhapsodic descrip-
tions of the delights of travel became the hallmark of travel writing in the modern age. “I
stumbled into this intense desire to travel,” he said as explanation for his phenomenal suc-
cess. His series grew to fifty-eight titles and
Europe on $5 a Day
became ubiquitous. Ten
years after its debut Nora Ephron wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay called “Eating and Sleep-
ing with Arthur Frommer.” By then, one out of every five Americans traveling to Europe
that summer was following his red travel guide like a bible, booking inexpensive hotels
and eating at out-of-the-way cafés, literally eating and sleeping with him and sending fawn-
ing thank you notes like one from a woman in Massachusetts saying that “not a day passed
that she did not bless the name Arthur Frommer.”
What Frommer had discovered was that tourism was becoming an industry and needed
to be reduced to its parts for consumers—book a plane, find a hotel, eat some meals, go on
a sightseeing tour—and he was more than happy to act as that go-between with his guide-
books, making a small fortune in the process. The question for the U.N. World Tourism
Organization was how to bottle that elixir, measure it and claim it officially as an industry.
The answer came in two parts—first from geopolitics, then from the industry itself.
It took nothing less than the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Empire to
open up minds and horizons. The Berlin Wall was the most famous of the barbed-wire bar-
riers erected by eastern and central European puppet governments to cut off their people
from their continental neighbors during the Cold War that had pitted the Communist
countries against those in the democratic market system of capitalism. Since the end of
World War II, the two sides had fought hot wars through proxies in Asia and South Amer-
ica and aimed nuclear weapons at each other in the ultimate standoff for supremacy.
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