Frommer, whose favourite city was Paris, bought back the rights to his travel guides in 2013 after decades serving as a consultant to various owners. The last of those was Google, which held the trademark for less than a year and sold it to Frommer for an undisclosed price.

Demand for printed travel guides has waned in recent years as travellers turned increasingly to online services such as TripAdvisor for reviews and advice.

Born on July 17, 1929, in Lynchburg, Virginia, Frommer grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, where his father, Nathan, worked in a clothing factory. His mother, Pauline, was Polish-born and taught him to speak Russian. The family moved to New York when Frommer was 14. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, where he edited the school newspaper, and worked for Newsweek as an office boy. He then studied at the University of Missouri, but transferred to New York University.

In 1953, Frommer earned a law degree from Yale University, where he edited the law journal. Serving in the military in Germany, he was assigned to US Army Intelligence, partly because of his ability to speak Russian. There he conceived his travel guide for soldiers eager to see other European countries.

Frommer returned to New York, where he worked in a legal firm while continuing to research his guidebooks during vacations. He found a distributor for the 5,000 copies of “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” that he had printed, and they sold out fast. After developing more than 50 titles, many of them “5 Dollars a Day” spinoffs, he began to hire writers for his guides.

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In 1961, he set up a wholesale tour operator called $5 a Day Tours Inc., which then became Arthur Frommer International Inc., one of the US’s biggest travel companies. He was chairman until 1981, according to an online biography.

Frommer sold his trademark to book publisher Simon & Schuster in 1977. The brand was owned by Pearson and IDG Books during the 1990s and then by John Wiley & Sons until Google acquired Frommer’s for $US23 million in 2012.

“Travel is the best of learning activities,” Frommer said in an interview with the Yale Law Report in 2005. “You should travel in a state of humility, asking more questions than making points.”

Frommer lived in New York with his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld. With his first wife, Hope Arthur, he had a daughter, Pauline, who continued the family legacy with her travel books. Hope Arthur died in 2017.

Bloomberg

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