Writer admits to tall tales from Colombia

The publishers of the Lonely Planet travel guides have been landed in an embarrassing mess by one of their authors, who has written a book exposing the world of budget travel writing. Thomas Kohnstamm, based in Seattle, claims the pay is so poor that writers have to plagiarise other publications, and that in his case he had dealt drugs to make ends meet.

Of a guide to Colombia to which he contributed, Kohnstamm said: "I found out very quickly I was not able to go to all the places I needed to go to... I was not able to make the money stretch out to the end. 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 who was an intern in the Colombian consulate."

Executives at Lonely Planet, which sells more than six million travel guides a year, have pointed that Kohnstamm's claim that he could not afford to travel to Colombia was "disingenuous", because he was hired to write about the history of the country, not to travel there.

Kohnstamm's damning comments came during an interview he gave to publicise a book he's written about his trade, Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?. He claims: "I've been contacted by a number of other Lonely Planet writers and everyone who has bothered to be in contact said, 'Good on you, it's a story that needed to be told'."

One Lonely Planet author, Jeanne Oliver, has written to the publishers saying they should shoulder some of the responsibility for Kohnstamm's remarks. "Why did you not understand that when you hire a constant stream of new, unvetted people, pay them poorly and set them loose, that someone, somehow was going to screw you?" she wrote.

Lonely Planet, based in Melbourne Australia, was founded in 1972 by Maureen and Tony Wheeler, a British couple who had travelled across Asia on the cheap. In 2007, BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the Beeb, bought 75 per cent of the company, which is involved in TV and internet publishing as well as continuing to publish the guide books.