Frommer’s World Is a Little Pricier, But It’s Still There

The president was Eisenhower. The U.S. dollar bought seven times as many French francs as it does today. And at his desk in a fancy Manhattan law firm, a young lawyer named Frommer had an idea.

If only he could make middle-class America understand how affordable Europe had become, Frommer reasoned, he could not only help thousands of Americans appreciate the riches of Western Civilization in person, but he could make a few dollars selling guidebooks.

So, in the fall of 1956, Arthur Frommer self-published “Europe on $5 a Day.” It was a success, and its 128 pages spawned companion volumes on New York and Mexico. Soon Frommer, his hands full with travel writing and publishing, gave up law.

Forty years later, Frommer has become a brand name in the travel industry, found on more than 180 different volumes now in print. The newest update of the first book is titled “Europe From $50 a Day,” which carries Frommer’s name but was written by a committee of other writers. (Under a contractual agreement between Frommer and Macmillan Travel books, the publisher uses his name on books written by lesser-known writers, who are generally credited on the books’ title pages.) About 9 million American travelers will crowd the streets of Europe this year.

“I held onto the ‘$5’ [in the book’s title] until around 1964,” said Frommer when I called him in New York recently. “I remember the first year that I had to change it to $10, I was filled with the most horrible feeling of dread. . . . I thought, ‘Well, that’s the end of it.’ ”

Not quite. A room at the Plaza Athenee hotel on the Champs Elysees in Paris, about $30 nightly in 1956, now runs about $775. The Frommer book’s favorite Parisian bistro dinner, 90 cents in 1956, is now $11.

A Florence hotel room fronting the Arno river could be found for $2 nightly. Now the prevailing figure is about $220. A cruise on the Queen Elizabeth from New York to England (six days) was $172 each way at off-season rates. The comparable figure these days on the Queen Elizabeth 2--the only ship now making that crossing regularly--is $2,195.

Yet while all those costs have shot skyward, one key expense has moved the other direction. In 1956, the price of a Los Angeles-London round-trip flight was $720, a figure so daunting at the time that many passengers bought their seats on the installment plan and paid off the debt over 20 months. As this month began, 28 years after the introduction of wide-bodied jets with larger seating capacities, several major carriers were offering fares of $538 on that same LAX-London route. In other words, after correcting for inflation, a flight to England was seven times more expensive in 1956 than it is now.

“Without a doubt, this is the single most remarkable difference in travel--this incredible instrument, the wide-bodied jet,” Frommer said.

The first money-saving rule decreed by the author in his 1956 text was “never specify that you want a private bath with your hotel room.” Now, Frommer acknowledged, American travelers’ tastes have substantially changed the lodging market in Europe, and throughout the Continent a traveler finds tiny modern bathrooms appended to old guest rooms that didn’t use to have them.

“The little pension without private baths is now hard to find,” Frommer said. “But that’s where the bargains are. And that remains a good law of travel all over the world.”

These frugal convictions apparently run in the family. Frommer’s daughter, who got married a few weeks ago, was put in charge of finding honeymoon lodgings on Bali. Her father reports that she selected a room in the rural uplands of the island. Shared bathroom down the hall. Twelve dollars a night. (When Frommer himself travels, he makes it a point to pay his own way at hotels he may write about, but often accepts free air transportation from tourist boards or other organizations interested in promoting certain destinations.)

While the world of travel has been changing, so has Frommer’s view of it. As his influence and fame grew, Frommer went into the tour business himself and essentially became a part of the travel industry establishment. But in the late 1980s, having stepped back from operating tours, Frommer concluded that “most of the vacation journeys undertaken by Americans were trivial and bland, devoid of important content, cheaply commercial, and unworthy of our better instincts and ideals.”

And so since 1989, he’s been writing and updating “Arthur Frommer’s New World of Travel,” a thick volume that surveys “alternative vacations that will change your life,” including educational programs, volunteer work and household-to-household exchanges. Frommer’s next big book project, “Arthur Frommer’s Outspoken Encyclopedia of Travel,” intended for a fall 1997 release, is another step in that direction: When that opinionated volume reaches stores, said America’s pied piper of European travel, “I will be persona non grata in a lot of places around the world.”

Reynolds travels anonymously at the newspaper’s expense, accepting no special discounts or subsidized trips. He welcomes comments and suggestions, but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053 or e-mail chris.reynolds@latimes.com.