The Life of a Travel Guide Writer

If you're a keen traveller, it's a good bet that you have a Frommer's Guide or two on your bookshelf. The highly respected guidebooks have been around since 1957 and the company is still family- owned. In this podcast, Natascha Mirosch talks with New Yorker Pauline Frommer, co-president of Frommer's Media, award winning-travel writer and editorial director of of Frommer's guidebooks, podcast host and daughter of Arthur Frommer who published that first guide, the seminal "Europe on $5 a day." They discuss those early days and what prompted Arthur, a lawyer by trade, to go into the publishing business and what place guidebooks have into today's world and into the future. This is a really fun and informative episode if you've ever wondered about the life of a travel writer (spoiler alert – there's not a lot of sitting around hotel pools sipping cocktails.) Pauline shares what it's like to have to write fast and fearlessly, to stay at a different hotel every night, haunt nightclubs until 3 in the morning and sometimes eat 2 dinners in a single night.  There's also some fantastic insider intel about her home city, New York – from where to stay, to her favourite café plus what you can safely exclude from your NYC bucket list.