Lonely Planet rocked by author fraud

Possibly this explains why some of the guide books I referred to (they weren’t Lonely Planet books BTW), while backpacking around Europe some years ago, were at times a tad off the mark with some of their advice…

Thomas Kohnstamm, who worked on more than a dozen guide books for the publisher, has even admitted that he didn’t visit one of the countries he wrote about, saying he worked on the book about Columbia from his US home. “They didn’t pay me enough to go (to) Columbia,” News Ltd newspapers reported him as saying. “I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian Consulate.

At least the information can be considered “second hand”, which seems like an advancement over some of the information I had to rely on.

One possible solution to this… scandal however would be to consider crediting “the chick” for her work, thus, written by Thomas Kohnstamm and the chick.

Maybe they could consider co-writing a book about long distance relationships as their next project?