Travel Guide Publisher Pauline Frommer
My interview with a travel guide publisher on the perils of AI for travel guidebooks
This is my first interview with a famous person or a public figure. Pauline Frommer agreed to let me interview her and gave me an hour of her time. This blog post tries to capture her voice and portrays the AI perils she faces publishing Frommer’s travel guidebook series
I know what you’re thinking.
The idea of me, an aspiring travel writer, interviewing Pauline Frommer, a major travel guide publisher, a veritable captain of industry, is laughable, yet it happened.
But this blog post is about Pauline and the perils AI poses to the publishing industry, not me.
In the Beginning…
It started as a modest plan to attend a writing conference, then things took an unexpected turn.
In August 2025, I traveled to Corte Madera, a quaint little town on the north side of the San Francisco Bay, to attend my first-ever Travel Writers’ conference, held in the popular and surprisingly spacious and cleverly-named Book Passage bookstore.
The store name harked back to a time when travelers “booked passage” on steamers.
Attending the conference had me in a high state of anticipation and excitement. I had been to other writing conferences, but had never met so many other people who, like me, considered themselves to be travel writers. Finally, I had found my tribe! There were about 200 of us.
Faculty for the conference included Pauline Frommer, the only daughter of Arthur Frommer, founder of the Frommer Travel Guide series, which once offered Europe on $5 a day.
Now, you get a cup of coffee in Europe for $5. Try to make it last all day.
Arthur never formally retired, but over the years, Pauline gradually took on more responsibility. As of his death in 2024, she became the President of Frommer Media. It was a difficult time. AI had become an existential threat to publishing companies.
I call her story, “The Perils of (Being) Pauline.” She has to protect Frommer’s from being swallowed by AI. Like a boa constrictor, it is squeezing publishers to death.
***
As an aspiring writer, my chances of meeting Pauline Frommer were about the same as my odds of winning a major Powerball Lottery. Her publishing company is substantial. Frommer’s has an estimated 100 travel guides in print, and over its history, has published 350 guides
Sales are estimated at over two million copies per year, slightly more than the sales of my first book, which soared to seven in one month, if you count the copies bought by members of my family. Estimates of annual revenue range from $25-$100 million.
Pauline, who has a lovely speaking and singing voice, also hosts the Frommer’s Travel Show, a weekly podcast on Apple and other platforms.
***
Pauline taught a short course on how to write travel guides. It involves verifying lots of facts and making intelligent observations that will meet travelers’ needs.
She instructed us not to write in the imperative. As in, “If you are in NYC for a day, STAY at the Ritz-Carlton, EAT at Trader Vic’s, and GO see a show at Carnegie Hall.
People dislike a travel guide telling them what to do; that’s what a spouse is for.
She asked each of us to write a brief review about the bookstore. Incapable of following instructions, I veered off topic and wrote in the first person.
After listening to me read my review to the class, she nodded and said, “That was interesting,” but then she paused, searching for the right word, “and, I would say, rather… solipsistic.”
Solipsistic! A big word I had never heard, whose meaning eluded me. It must be a compliment. Why else would she say that?
I looked around and smiled at the other attendees. I’m solipsistic!
One of them leaned toward me, frowned, and asked, “Do you know what that word means?” “I think it was a compliment,” A head shake. “No… You'd better look it up.”
After I tapped the word discreetly into my phone, a brief definition appeared: “self-absorbed, lacking empathy.” Stung, I slunk down miserably into my seat.
This might set back my hopes of asking if I could interview her.
I approached her after the session and told her about my weekly blog. I said, “You would be an amazing guest. Is there any chance I could interview you at some point?”
She dropped her chin and looked over her glasses into my eyes in a disconcerting way. (I disconcert easily.) It suggested a typical New Yorker reaction, “Are you serious?”
Under her gaze, I withered, shrinking as fast as a drop of water on a hot grill. She hesitated. For me, time froze. It seemed like a very long moment. What will she say?
Then, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Sure. Why not?“ handing me her card. “Here is my email. Contact me and we’ll set something up.” Relief! Yes!
***
Readers familiar with me and my blog are now shouting, “No, Pauline, don’t do it!”
Not only is my blog a mote of dust on the Internet, but I have to confess: I had never bought a Frommer’s Guide. Would she have agreed to talk to me if she had known?
Why had I not read one?
Was it because Arthur Frommer, a member of the greatest generation, launched it 70 years ago, after WWII?
Would my parents have relied on one for their trips abroad? Would using one mean I was turning into my parents, like the famous Progressive insurance ads where Dr. Rick strives to keep his patients from developing “parentamorphosis?”
Follow me down the mental rabbit hole, as I thought back over the decades of my adult life, to the halcyon days of my youth. Beginning with my stint in the Peace Corps in the ‘80s, I tried to act cool, including in my choice of travel guides.
Back then, the hip new guide series was Lonely Planet. It conveyed upon its clients a cachet of being a savvy, somewhat radical world traveler. Lonely Planeteers like me were broke-ass backpackers who stayed in dirty, cheap youth hostels. And we loved it.
What other guide would I have chosen? Not Fodor’s. Mentally, I transposed the letters so that it became Frodo’s Guide, the book for humans who wanted to visit Hobbit land.
After I heard Pauline — A sharp, funny, and engaging person — speak, I wondered if my ideas about Lonely Planet and Frommer’s, and yours, had remained stuck in the past.
Pauline, now that you know the awful truth, please accept my sincere apologies. I bought my first Frommer’s guide yesterday.
***
This blog is not about my choice of travel guides, or yours, but about the amazing, death-defying world of excitement and intrigue that is the travel guide industry.
This industry makes the James Bond movies look like local Boy Scout outings. I kid you not. Meet Pauline Frommer, 007, and learn how she came to take over Frommer’s.
The interview took place on Zoom on September 17th. Still on the road in my campervan, I launched the call from Schmohz Brewery, a friendly dive bar in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I stopped to find Wi-Fi.
Random people kept walking behind me onscreen as we spoke. I was dying of embarrassment about the situation, but Pauline remained cool and professional.
Let’s have her start us off with a song and dance routine.
Pauline’s Life On Stage and Her Writerly Reinvention
To my amazement, at the writer’s conference, Pauline told us she started her career performing in Broadway musicals, such as the West Coast road crew of Les Misérables.
During the interview, she said, “Actually, I started performing while in high school.”
I wondered, but did not ask, what her publisher father thought about his only daughter, a proud graduate of Wellesley, hoofing it on stage, hamming it up, instead of following in his footsteps, hunching over a typewriter, banging out travel guides, but I did not have the nerve to ask.
My guess is that he was very proud of her.
Thinking of her fame, I asked, “Why did you stop performing?” She said, “I … realized I enjoyed … writing more than (acting). When you’re an actor, you … always dance to someone else’s tune. (Writing made me feel) in control of my own destiny more.”
It was her choice; no one twisted her arm or strong-armed her. Yet, she had done well enough at acting to keep getting parts for many years.
She said, “I had an agent. I was in all the unions. I always had (actor’s union health) insurance. (As far as quitting acting)…I …never told my agent. For years, my husband would say, ’you’ve got to tell your agent,’ who would (still) call me for auditions, and I would …turn them down.”
But in the end, she traded “the stage for the page” as a chance to write her own script.
This is where it gets exciting, people.
***
The Dangerous World of Publishing Travel Guides
By now, you should be intrigued. Pinch yourself if you are not.
First, I asked Pauline the cheekiest question imaginable – how did she get the job? Suspicious people might jump to the conclusion that it was due to nepotism, i.e., the hiring of nepots, or even worse, daughterism.
For the real story, we must turn back the clock to the late 1970s. A perilous time.
In addition to producing travel guide books, her father, Arthur, “had also become a tour operator,” organizing chartered group tours to destinations around the world. Back in the days when the U.S. airline industry was still highly regulated, tourists had to rely on charter flights to fly places the airlines didn’t, or to fly on days or at times when the airlines didn’t offer flights.
Suddenly, in 1978, at the height of his business, she said, “The U.S. Government deregulated the airlines, killing his charter travel business overnight … he was (at risk of) stranding people all over the world …he had tours out, (but) he ran out of money.”
If her father had been unscrupulous, he might have absconded with the little money he had left to a banana republic that did not have extradition treaties with the U.S., leaving his clients to find their own way home. An honorable man, he did not do that.
By all accounts, Arthur Frommer was a very good man. He would never strand people.
Pauline went on. “So, to stop that from happening, (and to raise money to get his clients home), he licensed the (series of guide) books (to other publishers such as Simon & Schuster, MacMillan, John Wiley and Sons, and finally, Google.)
What she did not say, but sensed, was that these guidebooks were like his children. Here he was, sending the children away, as people did during the Great Depression, to stay with relatives who lived in the country, to anyone who could take care of them.
I imagined that it was a difficult decision to make, and a painful one for him as well.
The companies asked him to keep writing the guides. Pauline said that the other publishing companies “hired (my father to) put out the Frommer guides for about 30, maybe 35 years.”
It was a long haul. Finally, in 2013, Pauline came to the rescue. She told me, rather cryptically, “He and I got the books back.” How did they get them back? There must be a story there. Stay tuned.
***
But other major changes had taken place in the intervening years as well. By the 1990s, everyone had access to the Internet. The other publishers “wanted to start a website. … there were no travel websites, (yet).… so they (asked her) dad to start frommers.com … my father need(ed) a young person to help him.”
This is where, in my vivid, unconstrained imagination, I see her playing Q, the Bond movie techno-whiz. “At that point, nobody (who worked for him) knew anything about the Internet… “So I helped him start frommers.com. That’s how I got started.”
In reality, getting the books back probably involved arranging financing and sorting out legal issues, although I think it would be more dramatic if there had been a high-speed chase. Pauline, driving a semi-truck loaded with the liberated guidebooks, was being pursued by the bad guys.
Getting the books back, however, was nothing compared to keeping control of their contents.
***
AI – Pushing Far Beyond the Limits of Current Laws
If you think figuring out how to fly stranded clients home and rescuing your books from the clutches of evil publishers is enough intrigue for a movie plot, just wait.
Publishing has gotten weirder and more ominous than ever. Pauline told me what AI is doing to Frommer’s and other publishers of books and to periodicals like the NY Times.
Discussing AI can instantly send the normally calm, composed Pauline into a passionate rant.
“We’ve had our (all of our) material stolen by AI to train (their) machines … I am trying to get out the message … (for readers to trust human beings because they) sleep in the hotel beds … see the art … (visit) the museums and eat the restaurant meals.”
Pauline was the first person to drive that message home for me. I thought AI preyed primarily on defenseless individual authors and purloined their works.
But AI is going after even the largest publishers and bleeding them dry.
How have AI companies gotten away with it so far?
When a new technology first appears, it disrupts the status quo. We lack the laws to regulate it. Our laws evolve in response to new situations, not in anticipation of them.
“If you look at the (copyright) law,” Pauline said, “there are two parts: the (first part) says … nobody can (repeat verbatim) what you said. … (but) it gets very tricky with AI, because they’re taking our material and putting it in their own words.”
”However,” she continued, “the (copyright) … law (also says) nobody can use your … material to hurt your business … Frommer’s, the New York Times, The Washington Post, every media (outlet)… is making the… argument that (AI scraped) our material (without payment or acknowledgment, hurting our bottom lines… Frommer’s web traffic is down 40%!” (because users just search AI to get all the info they want.)
How can I convey the horror of what AI does? Imagine a Bond supervillain devising a new technology that could steal all the contents of your brain, and there was no way to stop it under existing laws. That’s essentially what AI is doing to publishing.
“Pretty much every newspaper, every publisher is in trouble. It’s crazy.”
The Advent of eBooks versus Wizzywiggy
Next, I asked her if people still preferred printed travel guides or the eBook versions. She told me, “Only 3% of travel guide sales are eBooks.”
What? Why is that? She said, and I quote:
“People don’t buy the eBook version… eBooks have trouble with being WIZZYWIGGY.”
My mind went blank. “Wizzy what?” I said. She repeated the foreign-sounding word.
“WYSIWYG. Most people want to change the font size so they can read it better. But guidebooks are… templated …( many) paragraphs are next to (a) map or (a) photo.”
The eBook format is reflowable. So, “When users change the font, it screws (everything) up.”
Seeing the still-blank expression on my face, she said, “Nobody has been able to … create an eBook (that lets you)… change the font …(without things going) kablooey.”
Oh. Kablooey. Why didn’t she just say that in the first place?
Too embarrassed to admit my ignorance, I asked ChatGPT later what the word means. It’s an acronym for “What you see is what you get.” The eBook format is preset.
Honestly, do I have to explain everything to you people?
Next, I asked Pauline a few tough interview questions she has probably never heard before, such as, Why does the travel industry still sell Africa solely as a safari destination, and will the cessation of U.S. foreign aid adversely affect American travelers when they go abroad?
Space does not permit me to present her response to those questions.
***
Why Do People Travel?
To understand why I asked Pauline this question, it will help to know a little about me.
Three years ago, after publishing my first book, My Two Centuries in Africa, I decided in June 2022 to begin my own national book tour to the lower 48 states.
To eliminate hotel expenses, I got a mini-campervan and boondocked my way across America. After six exhausting months, I realized that I was hooked on nomadic living.
My research since then indicates that modern humans had been nomadic hunter-gatherers for 95% of our existence, only settling down to live sedentarily in cities and on farms about 10,000 years ago.
Scientists also estimate that 98% of our DNA dates back to when we were still nomads, so our decision to settle down in one place is at odds with our primitive natures. In addition, 20% of us (like me) have the wanderlust gene variant, DRD4-7R. For some of us, traveling is a compulsion.
This idea isn’t abstract for me. After six months on the road, something clicked inside me.
***
Whereas the travel industry markets travel as a way to see exotic places, after sharing my research, I asked Pauline, “What do you think, do humans have an urge to travel?”
She smiled, “It’s a very interesting (idea about travel). I love it. It’s … fascinating … “
I began to think she might buy into my theory. But this was not her first rodeo. She is a professional who knows how to handle quirky questions, not straying too far from the trodden path.
After giving a nod to my idea, she added, “There might be something to it… (but) I … think … everybody travels for different reasons… some people … want to go and lie on a beach, whereas other people travel to explore.” Well-played, Pauline.
But if travel helps us tap into something primal inside us, guidebook publishers like Frommer’s aren’t just selling us useful tips — they’re helping us satisfy a human need.
I’d love to see a guidebook subtitle saying: “Heed your need to roam.”
The F-word
Then I pulled out my secret weapon: The F-word: Ineffable.
How many of us, I asked her, have had the experience of seeing the ineffable—wondrous things beyond words, then struggling later to explain to others how we felt transformed by it.
Most people I know who travel encounter a puzzling reaction after they get home and talk about the ineffable. Other people tend to listen politely for a minute, then they say:
“Oh, I’m glad you had a nice trip. That’s wonderful.” End of conversation.
That suggests humans have to experience the ineffable personally. It’s impossible to communicate it from one person to another. It goes beyond what words can convey.
I expected Pauline to gush about this, but it did not elicit a strong response.
Kablooey.
***
Why Did You Let Me Interview You?
The reason for her willingness to let me interview her kept me up at night. Like the Grinch, I was pondering. “Why do the Who’s down in Whoville love Christmas?
I asked about it. Choosing her words carefully, Pauline told me, “When people ask to interview me, I don’t always say yes. But Book Passage (the conference where we met) is a (special) place. I get very fond of the folks there… that was part of it.“
She did not specify that I was one of the people she grew fond of. Nevertheless, I am basking in the warm glow of her comment, as if it were intended for me personally.
All Good Things Come to an End
During the interview, out of respect, I kept one eye on the clock so as not to exceed my allotted hour. With 10 minutes left, I asked her, “How are you doing for time?”
“Well,” she said, “if it’s OK with you, I have to interview someone in a few minutes. It would be great to wrap up a few minutes early.” “Sure,” I said, surprised a company president would ask if we could end early, instead of telling me she had to move on.
Let me end by asking you to support the efforts of Frommer’s and other publishers to survive AI.
Without Q’s goofy gadgets or 007’s PPK pistol, Pauline is in for the fight of her life. Frommer’s and other publishers would appreciate your support. Frommer’s may have survived the disaster of airline deregulation, the limbo of book licensing, and the advent of the Internet, but now it faces the ravenous appetite of its most sinister enemy, AI.
For those who believe travel is a human need, she is a travel heroine worth rooting for.
Interested? Where to Next?
Don’t be like me, clinging to outdated notions about travel guides your whole life.
Check out The Frommer’s Travel Show - Podcast - Apple Podcasts
Personally, two recent topics caught my eye, ‘The Canadian Maritimes” and ‘Retro Road Trips.”
Also check out the Frommer website, at frommers.com
Two articles intrigued me. One, ‘Sicily’s Penis Bar, the Top Draw in a Quaint Italian Village,” and two, “Finding Dog Friendly Hiking Trails.”
Further Reading: For anyone interested in the wanderlust gene variant:
Wired for Risk: The Genetic Roots of Bold Behavior | Psychology Today (2025)
Why do humans travel? | Adventure.com (2024)
The Science of Wanderlust | Condé Nast Traveler Conde Nast Travel (2017)
The “wanderlust gene” – is my need to travel hereditary? – Always Carry On. (2018)
Fun read. Thanks...
Good interview, Carl, what an interesting history!