KEY POINTS:
Reading a Lonely Planet guidebook may never be the same, following revelations by an American writer that he described places he'd never been to, sold drugs to make ends meet and gave a restaurant a good review after having table-top sex with a waitress.
Thomas Kohnstamm, who has contributed to a dozen of the titles, made the admissions in his memoir Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? - and the travel guide publishers have taken a rather dim view of the matter.
By all accounts, writing for one of the books is hard work - stressful, demanding and poorly paid. Kohnstamm's activities may be exceptionable but they were on his own time and the restaurant (of which he wrote that "the table service is friendly") had closed at the time of his assignation.
The reports on places unvisited are more problematic, though being there is not necessarily everything. More than one Lonely Planet reader must have wondered whether a given entry was written by someone who had peered through an establishment's window rather than darkening its door.
Kohnstamm, who will be at the Auckland and Writers and Readers Festival next month, has scored a publicity coup for his engagingly titled book. The Lonely Planet folks should leave him to it and remember that sometimes the best form of damage control is dignified silence.
