“(CNN) — A Lonely Planet author says he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay, an Australian newspaper reported Sunday.
Lonely Planet publishes more than 500 titles and employs 300 authors, according to its Web site.
Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book on his misadventures, also said he didn’t travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because “they didn’t pay me enough,” The Daily Telegraph reported.
“I wrote the book in San Francisco [California],” he is quoted as saying in the Telegraph. “I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”
The 32-year-old Seattle, Washington, native also claims he accepted free travel, which is a violation of the company’s policy.
Kohnstamm has worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including its titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Chile and South America.
An e-mail from Lonely Planet said Kohnstamm’s book were being reviewed, the newspaper reported.”
I’ll bet you the Rick Steves folks are chuckling right now…
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