US:THE LANGUAGE was hardly typical of the chief executive of a respected travel guide publisher. "This is a s**t," Lonely Planetchief executive Judy Slatyer wrote to employees. "None of you deserve it, given the effort you put in."
The problem for Ms Slatyer and her colleagues was what one of them described in another company-wide message as "a car crash waiting to happen": a Lonely Planetauthor had published an exposé of the world of budget travel writing.
Thomas Kohnstamm, co-author of a dozen Lonely Planetguides to Latin America and the Caribbean, has written his own book in which he tells how the life of a travel writer is one of poor pay, cribbing information from other sources and, in one case, failing to visit the country about which he was writing.
The furore over Kohnstamm's claims threatens to undermine the series' most important asset: trustworthiness.
"I found out very quickly I was not able to go to all the places I needed to go to," he told interviewers at the weekend. "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."
Lonely Planet, which sells more than six million guidebooks each year, moved swiftly to counter Kohnstamm's charges.
But another Lonely Planetauthor, Jeanne Oliver, who has written guides to several European countries, said the company should shoulder some responsibility: "Why did you [ management] 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.
When Kohnstamm was recruited to write for Lonely Planet, he had few obvious qualifications other than the ability to speak Spanish. He left his job, he has said, threw his mobile phone in a river and went to Brazil (where Portuguese is spoken).
"I've been contacted by a number of other Lonely Planetwriters and everyone who has bothered to be in contact said, 'Good on you, it's a story that needed to be told'," Kohnstamm said. "But the book is fundamentally about my personal experience and not intended as an exposé on Lonely Planet." - ( Guardian service )