Arthur and Pauline Frommer talk to Ali Velshi

Inspired by his travels while based overseas as a GI, Arthur Frommer wrote “Europe on $5 a Day.” It was the book that changed the way we traveled. For decades, Frommer and now his daughter, Pauline Frommer, have published hundreds of books about the world’s best-known tourist destinations and its hidden gems.

Ali Velshi: Arthur, you first saw Europe in 1953.

Arthur Frommer: I was a GI. I was drafted to the Army at the time of the Korean War, and to my great good fortune, I was sent to Europe rather than Korea.

Because you had some language skills?

Arthur: Yes, I had linguistic abilities, yes. So they discovered that, and eventually I was sent to Berlin. I was made a member of U.S. Army intelligence, and every weekend when I had a pass, when I had the ability to leave the barracks, I got on a free Air Force flight, and I flew somewhere in Europe, never dreaming that I would write a guidebook about it. But in my last three weeks in the Army, I decided to tell my fellow GIs about it. I wrote a book called “The GI’s Guide to Traveling in Europe,” which later, when civilianized, became “Europe on $5 a Day.”

Pauline, in a matter of speaking, you got involved in the family business in the mid-’60s because you started traveling with your parents then?

Pauline Frommer: Yes, I was 4 months old when I first went to Europe. And there weren’t even porto-cribs then. They would just push me into a drawer at night, and my father always says they joked about calling it “Europe on Five Diapers a Day”. This was in the days before Pampers, so this was not an easy thing to do, to travel with a baby.

It’s hard for people to imagine because we’re so about budget travel and affordable trips these days, but back in the day, Arthur, it was not common for Americans, young Americans especially, to go gallivanting around Europe.

Arthur: It was completely uncommon. You were told that Europe was a war-torn continent, that it was still recovering from World War II, that you couldn’t safely travel in Europe unless you saved up for it and went there with a lot of money.

Because you’d stay at the best hotels?

Arthur: Oh, always at the best hotels. You could not risk staying at lower-class hotels. I knew this was nonsense. I knew that not only could you do it for far less money — the dollar was strong — but you could also do it better. There was a day when I was sitting at a sidewalk cafe and I saw a busload of tourists passing in front of me with their noses pressed against the glass. They’re 45 people crammed into a motor coach, and I thought to myself, “If I had any money, I would have been in this motor coach having this totally artificial view of European life.” Instead, I had no money, and therefore I was nursing a glass of wine for the entire afternoon, drinking in the life and the people, the scenes of Europe. And I knew that this was the way to travel.

In this time, Arthur, since you’ve been writing, Americans went from not being tourists to being that brash American tourist who seems removed from the cultural experience, and now we seem to have moved into a place where we want to be more familiar with the environment to help preserve and continue the environment. So we’ve changed the tourist?

Arthur: We’ve made a point in our travel guides from the beginning that it is part of the adventure of life to put yourself into a situation where everything is new and novel, where the lifestyles, the theologies, the political viewpoints are totally opposite to what you believe, to which you confront other ways of thinking. We say that that’s exciting.

Pauline: And we’ve tried to move away from the ugly American that you are talking about, in terms of mass tourism has taken over the world.

And have we moved away from that? Are Americans better appreciated as travelers and tourists now?

Pauline: Well, you have to remember that only 35 percent or so of Americans even have passports. So we’re not traveling as much as other countries. Are we better tourists? I don’t know.

Arthur: I think we are. I think the more egregious examples of poor tourism are really being provided by other cultures.

Pauline: Don’t name them.

Arthur: I will name one. There is a movement of Chinese tourists into Venice nowadays, and they go on a conveyor belt of travel.

Because the Chinese are on their way to becoming the biggest group of tourists in the world, bar none.

Pauline: That’s true.

Arthur: That’s true. But Chinese travel presently is like American travel used to be. It is group-oriented. You cram yourself into a 45-passenger motor coach, and you look at the life of Europe from behind the glass window of your motor coach. You are not encouraged to travel independently. I have always said that the way to sightsee in any country in the world is to simply get up in the morning and head out on your own two feet at random into the center of the city. And when people, stunningly, ask, “What if you get lost if that happens?” I respond, “The nicest things happen to people when they get lost.”

I travel a good amount, and I always think that when you travel a lot, people think you’re more sophisticated or smarter than you are, except when I talk about the fact that I really like cruises.

Pauline: You like cruises?

Arthur: Ooh, cruise — you’re getting me a little upset here. There are good cruises, and there are bad cruises. Unfortunately, there is a trend in the cruise ship industry to convert cruise ships into amusement parks. I so badly dislike that type of cruise. I love to go on a cruise to enjoy the storied pleasures of a cruise. I love to have good conversations with other intellectually curious people. I love to hear lectures. And I’m outspoken and disliked by many cruise ship officials when I say that I don’t look upon a cruise ship as an amusement park. If it is an amusement park, then why does it have to leave the port? Why can’t it just stay docked on the west side of Manhattan? It could save a great deal of money.

You’re less anti-cruise?

Pauline: I’m a mom of two.

So there’s a convenience aspect?

Pauline: So my kids love them, and I get to read the novel because they’re on the bungee jumping or whatever they’re doing. So I don’t see any big problem. This something my father and I disagree on.

Arthur: We disagree.

This is interesting. Let’s talk about this concept of intergenerational travel.

Arthur: I’ve been against intergenerational travel all my life.

Pauline: We went on a whole intergenerational trip that you insisted on.

Arthur: By which time the children had grown up to be 10 years old, 11 years old, 12 years old. The idea of traveling with children that are under the age of 6 is to travel with somebody that does not have the same interests as you as, who ruins your own vacation. I remember, Pauline, when we took you to Copenhagen, all you wanted to do was to go into a carnival area nearby and go on fun rides, and I wanted to go into museums.

Pauline: See, this is where we differ. We’re running the guidebooks together now. It’s now a family-owned business. And we differ, and I think you see both points of view in the books, but I find traveling with my children opens doors.

This is interesting. Let’s talk about this concept of intergenerational travel.

Arthur: I’ve been against intergenerational travel all my life.

Pauline: We went on a whole intergenerational trip that you insisted on.

Arthur: By which time the children had grown up to be 10 years old, 11 years old, 12 years old. The idea of traveling with children that are under the age of 6 is to travel with somebody that does not have the same interests as you as, who ruins your own vacation. I remember, Pauline, when we took you to Copenhagen, all you wanted to do was to go into a carnival area nearby and go on fun rides, and I wanted to go into museums.

Pauline: See, this is where we differ. We’re running the guidebooks together now. It’s now a family-owned business. And we differ, and I think you see both points of view in the books, but I find traveling with my children opens doors.

At some point, while I was sleeping, you went from Europe on $5 a day to $10 a day, and then you had a big jump.

Arthur: We went up and up and up until we finally had to drop it. And we also realized that there were people with broader viewpoints who wanted to spend more money. We now recommend the expensive as well as the budget, but we have limits there. I don’t think we ever have recommended a hotel that charges as much as $700 and $800 a night for a double room. We look for value.

And this is much more common. On one hand, the Internet allows you to get better deals than you could have in the past, but on the other hand, hotels can be very expensive. And it’s given birth to a whole slew of other options, including staying in people’s homes and Airbnb, and I know you’ve written extensively on things like Airbnb.

Arthur: Those options are a major part of our guidebooks. There’s a major trend today that finds millions of Americans substituting apartments and homes for standard hotel rooms, and that is such a definite, unmistakable trend that there are dozens of companies now that make these arrangements for you and permit you to stay in a residential neighborhood in an apartment or a home.

And this is not without controversy, particularly in this city.

Pauline: Oh, yes, absolutely.

In New York there are people who are up in arms —

Pauline: Well, there are some people who are arguing that it hurts the housing stock. That it takes too many apartments away from long-term residents.

Because it makes these short-term rental stocks —

Pauline: Yeah, I don’t know. From my personal experience, everybody who I know that does it needs the money. We live in an expensive city, here in New York City, so I have friends that leave the apartment for a week, and that way they pay the rent for a month.

Do you like this development?

Arthur: I do like the development. I find that it opens up a great storehouse of accommodations to people who cannot afford normal hotel rates.

One of the things that I’m spending a lot of time on this year is a real study of the middle class. For that audience, for that family that feels that it’s a struggle — we meet so many of them — they work, two parents working, and they don’t feel that they can afford a family vacation. What do you suggest?

Pauline: National parks. The greatest value, the greatest riches of this country are in our national parks, and I know my kids would much rather camp out than go to a hotel. There are also hostels, and you know that sounds like I’m putting somebody down, but hostels have gone eons from what they used to be like.

In terms of the standard —

Pauline: In terms of the standards, in terms of design, some of them are very glamorous and in beautiful settings. There’s one in San Francisco that is in a setting that a million-dollar hotel couldn’t get, and they have family rooms, and you go down for breakfast, and your kids are surrounded by teens from all over the world, teens and people in their early 20s, and they love it.

Arthur, where have you not been that you would like to have been?

Arthur: I never got to Tibet, unfortunately, before the Chinese more or less closed up your ability to visit Tibet. I have not been to Sri Lanka. I have not been to Antarctica because I’m worried about getting seasick on the ship going there. There are a few places that I have not gotten to, but I’m continuing to travel, continuing to try to discover new places to recommend, the new and the untouristed destinations today or those destinations whose currencies have plummeted against the U.S. dollar.

Pauline I’m going to ask you if you could recommend to our audience, one destination to really consider that might not have been on their radar. What would that be?

Pauline: Well, it really depends on who they are. For families with slightly older children, not toddlers, Belize is pretty darn incredible. You do things that would be illegal here in the United States because they would be too worried about insurance issues. You swim into caves, and you climb up ladders until you come into rooms which have priceless artifacts in them from when the Mayans did human sacrifices there centuries ago, yet they’re calcified to the floor so they can’t be moved, and there’s even human bones in these places from the sacrifices. Within the U.S., New Orleans, but everybody knows about New Orleans.

But not everybody knows you can go there and have a great time, and while they’re still struggling with some things, it remains a remarkable and such a different tourist destination from so much in America.

Pauline: And so much that’s interesting there has to do with their struggles. You can take tours of where the levees broke, and the money goes to people who are still struggling with those issues. You can go to one of the best history museums in the United States, the World War II Museum, which is staffed by volunteer docents, many of whom are veterans of World War II.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Tune in to see this episode on Saturday, March 15 at 730pm ET/430pm PT.