Arthur Frommer, who expanded the horizons of postwar Americans and virtually invented the low-budget travel industry with his seminal guidebook, “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day: A Guide to Inexpensive Travel,” which introduced millions to an experience once considered the exclusive domain of the wealthy, died on Monday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 95.
His stepdaughter Tracie Holder confirmed the death, from complications of pneumonia.
Mr. Frommer built an empire of guidebooks, package tours, hotels and other services on the bedrock of his first book, published in 1957, which sold millions of copies in annually updated editions until 2007. (It was .)
His earnest prose, alternately lyrical and artless but always compulsively informative, conveyed a near-missionary zeal for travel and elevated “Frommer’s” from the how-to genre to the kind of book that could change a person’s worldview.
To Mr. Frommer, travel wasn’t just about sightseeing in foreign places; it was about seeing those places on their own terms, removing the membrane that separated them from us. In short, it was about enlightenment. And with the affordability that he could guarantee, it was practically middle-class Americans’ democratic duty, to hear him tell it, to exercise their inalienable right to see London, Paris and Rome.
“This is a book,” he wrote, “for American tourists who a) own no oil wells in Texas, b) are unrelated to the Aga Khan, c) have never struck it rich in Las Vegas and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation.”
Most Americans who visited Europe at the time were likely to go for the “grand” part of the grand tour: They traveled first class by propeller plane and ocean liner, steamer trunks in tow; booked pricey accommodations; went sightseeing with herds of other Americans; and retired in the evenings to hotels where, as Mr. Frommer wrote, “English fills the air” and “bridge games go on in the lobby.”
Mr. Frommer did not approve. Budget travelers not only did it cheaper, he said; they learned more, enjoyed more and gave Europeans a better account of the American national character by following a few simple Arthur Frommer rules:
Never travel first class. (If going by boat, consider freighters.) Pack lightly enough to be free from porters, taxi drivers and bellhops. Stay in pensions; take the room without the bath. Eat in restaurants patronized by locals. Try to engage locals in conversation. Study maps. Take public transportation. Buy a Eurail pass.
And when in Venice, he warned readers regretfully, “Stay away from gondolas; they cost as much as $3 an hour!” (Exclamation points became a trademark.)
Mr. Frommer’s call to travel touched a chord — the first 5,000 copies of his 120-page book, which he published himself, sold out almost overnight — and it did so at a fortuitous moment. Airlines began trans-Atlantic jet passenger service in 1958, significantly cutting travel time and inaugurating a period of exponential growth in travel to Europe.
Mr. Frommer was selling 300,000 copies of his guide every year by the mid-1960s; by some contemporary accounts, they represented a quarter to a third of all European guidebooks sold in the United States.
By 1977, when he sold his publishing enterprise to Simon & Schuster, his catalog of books had grown to include budget guides to New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Mexico, the Caribbean, Hawaii, Japan and 300 other destinations. (Today the Frommer enterprise says it has sold more 75 million books and has 130 active titles, available in print and in eBooks.)
After the sale, Mr. Frommer remained chairman and president of Arthur Frommer International Inc., which included one of the largest wholesale tour operations in the country and eventually the online consumer travel site . John Wiley & Sons acquired the company in 2001 and sold it to Google in 2012 for a reported $23 million.
In a 2007 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Frommer of the pre-“5 Dollars a Day” 1950s. “You were told by the entire travel industry that the only way to go to Europe was first class,” he said, “that this was a war-torn continent coming out of World War II, that it literally wasn’t safe to stay anywhere other than first-class hotels.”
Not only was that false, he said; it was also a disservice to the public. “The moment you put yourself in a first-class hotel, you become walled off from life, in a world devoted to creature comforts,” Mr. Frommer in 2009. “When you go to sleep, you no longer know whether you’re in a one-star or a five-star hotel. Big rooms and amenities are all sheer nonsense.”
Mr. Frommer changed the industry profoundly, Roger Dow, the former chief executive of the United States Travel Association, an industry group, said in an interview for this obituary in 2014. “Before him, the average American just did not go to Europe, or much of anywhere else overseas,” he said. “This guy single-handedly opened up that prospect to a huge new population.”
Arthur Bernard Frommer was born in Lynchburg, Va., on July 17, 1929, to Nathan and Pauline Frommer and raised in Jefferson City, Mo. His parents were both immigrants — his mother from Poland, his father from Austria. His father, who worked for a garment manufacturing company, was transferred to New York in 1944.
The Frommer family’s move to Brooklyn was not a happy one for him. “I thought my life had ended,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “What human being would want to live anywhere but Jefferson City?”
He attended Erasmus Hall High School, where he was the editor of the school newspaper, and majored in political science at New York University. After graduating from N.Y.U., he attended Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the law review and graduated with honors. He was drafted into the Army in 1953, at the tail end of the Korean War, and, because he spoke German, French and Russian, assigned to an intelligence unit in Germany.
That assignment changed his life: He developed his passion for travel in Europe, visiting as many cities as his leave and his modest government paycheck would allow, and finding bargains never listed in the long-established travel guides.
“I never thought I was ever going to be a travel writer,” he told Michael Shapiro, the author of “A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration” (2004). “I was just having a wonderful time traveling on the slimmest of funds.”
But before his discharge, he decided to write a guidebook, “The G.I.’s Guide to Travelling in Europe,” which featured some of those bargain finds and became the model for “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day.”
On his return from Army service, Mr. Frommer was hired as a litigator by the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He worked there for six years, both before and after the publication of his groundbreaking book in 1957. “Every summer I’d run back to Europe for a month and hit the streets,” updating for the next year’s edition, he said.
He left the law firm in 1961 to devote himself full time to the travel-book business.
For more than 20 years Mr. Frommer also wrote a syndicated newspaper travel column and had a weekly syndicated radio show, originating from WOR in New York.
His first marriage, to the actress and teacher , ended in divorce. In addition to his stepdaughter Ms. Holder, Mr. Frommer is survived by his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld; his daughter and business partner, Pauline Frommer; another stepdaughter, Jill Holder; and four grandchildren.
In 2013, eight months after it was sold, Mr. Frommer for an undisclosed sum and announced plans to publish a new series of guidebooks — both digitally and on paper — under a new company name, FrommerMedia, which continues to operate.
Mr. Frommer gave up his radio program and stepped back from the business when the pandemic began, Pauline Frommer said in an email. They had been co-presidents of the Frommer enterprise (Ms. Frommer also hosts the podcast )
Despite the declining demand for travel books in the face of competition from free websites like TripAdvisor, Mr. Frommer continued to believe that there was strong demand among travelers for original, high-quality, well-written research.
“I feel like I’m starting over again,” he when the Google deal was announced.
“I’ve always felt,” he told Michael Shapiro, “that travel is a serious subject whose rewards go well beyond that of entertainment and recreation. The average magazine or newspaper editor looks upon travel as a subject of trivia, as something that you engage in to relax from stress, to reinvigorate you. I’ve never believed that.”