Popular travel guidebook giant Lonely Planet has suffered a severe blow to its credibility, with one of its authors admitting to plagiarizing and making up huge sections of his books, an Australian newspaper reported yesterday.
Author Thomas Kohnstamm told the Australian Sunday Telegraph he had worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including their titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, South America, Venezuela and Chile.
The Lonely Planet guidebooks sell more than six million copies a year.
The Sunday Telegraph said Kohnstamm also claims in his new book Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? that he accepted free travel, contravening company policy.
He said in one case he had not even visited the country he wrote about.
"They didn't pay me enough to go to Colombia. I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern at the Colombian consulate," the newspaper quoted Kohnstamm as saying.
Mr Kohnstamm's confession is a severe blow to Lonely Planet, which is considered a bible to travelers all over the world.
Lonely Planet said it had reviewed Kohnstamm's guidebooks but had not found any inaccuracies in them, the Sunday Telegraph said.
Mr Kohnstamm was the principle writer on the Lonely Planet guide to Brazil and was a coordinating author on the Lonely Planet titles on Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Last week, Lonely Planet chief executive, Judy Slatyer, sent an email to her writers condemning Kohnstamm, saying her greatest concern is his assertion that his advance payment was "barely enough to cover the air fare" and that many guide book writers do not check their facts in a bid to finish before they "run up credit card debt" and "burn out".
（英語點津 Celene 編輯）
About the broadcaster:
Bernice Chan is a foreign expert at China Daily Website. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Bernice has written for newspapers and magazines in Hong Kong and most recently worked as a broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, producing current affairs shows and documentaries
