A "Lonely Planet" writer says he plagiarized and invented sections of the popular travel guidebooks and sold drugs to supplement poor pay, media reported on April 14, 2008.
In his biography, "Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?," Thomas Kohnstamm details how he allegedly would fabricate information on travel destinations rather than actually visit them.
"They didn't pay me enough to go to Colombia. I wrote the book in San Francisco," he says in the book. "I got the information from a chick I was dating -- an intern at the Colombian consulate."
The 32-year-old Seattle, Washington, native claims that he was so short of money at one point he shared an apartment with a Brazilian prostitute called Inara.
On another occasion he sold drugs to buy food after claiming that the advance he was paid barely covered the cost of his flight.
Kohnstamm worked on more than a dozen guides, including the titles on Brazil, Colombia, South America, the Caribbean, Venezuela and Chile.
An e-mail in the name of "Planet" chief Janet Slater said the guidebook company would be investigating Kohnstamm's allegations thoroughly.
"If we find that the content has been compromised, we'll take urgent steps to fix it," the e-mail reads. "Once we've got things right for travelers as quickly as we can, we'll look at what we do and how we do it to ensure as best we can, that this type of thing never happens again.''
The Lonely Planet series publishes 500 titles, updates every two to four years, and employs 300 authors, according to the company's website. It reportedly sells more than 6 million guides a year.
