Arthur Frommer, 95, Dies; His Guidebooks Opened Travel to the Masses

Books|Arthur Frommer, 95, Dies; His Guidebooks Opened Travel to the Masses

Arthur Frommer, who expanded the horizons of postwar Americans and virtually invented the low-budget travel industry with his seminal guidebook, “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day: A Guide to Inexpensive Travel,” which introduced millions to an experience once considered the exclusive domain of the wealthy, died on Monday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 95.

His stepdaughter Tracie Holder confirmed the death, from complications of pneumonia.

Mr. Frommer built an empire of guidebooks, package tours, hotels and other services on the bedrock of his first book, published in 1957, which sold millions of copies in annually updated editions until 2007. (It was “Europe From $95 a Day” by then.)

His earnest prose, alternately lyrical and artless but always compulsively informative, conveyed a near-missionary zeal for travel and elevated “Frommer’s” from the how-to genre to the kind of book that could change a person’s worldview.

To Mr. Frommer, travel wasn’t just about sightseeing in foreign places; it was about seeing those places on their own terms, removing the membrane that separated them from us. In short, it was about enlightenment. And with the affordability that he could guarantee, it was practically middle-class Americans’ democratic duty, to hear him tell it, to exercise their inalienable right to see London, Paris and Rome.