Thomas Kohnstamm and our guidebooks

A former Lonely Planet author, Thomas Kohnstamm, has written a book called Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? about his life as a travel writer. Thomas' book contains several allegations about his guidebook writing.

Specifically, Thomas claims that during his time as a travel author, he skipped visiting certain destinations, plagiarised from other sources and traded good reviews for in-kind favours.

This behaviour is completely contrary to what Lonely Planet is all about. Because of the nature of Thomas' claims, we've carefully reviewed all the Lonely Planet content he has worked on.

Here's the lowdown.

1. There are three titles in print to which Thomas has contributed on-the-ground research. The affected titles are Chile & Easter Island (7th edition), South America on a shoestring (10th edition) and Caribbean Islands (4th edition). Authors who are in these destinations now, or who have recently researched them, have conducted a full review of his text.

To ensure that our review was conducted to the highest standard we have had the process audited externally by Christopher Ward, a former editor of the Daily Express and the co-founder and chairman of Redwood Publishing. He conducted the audit and has this to say: "I have reviewed the additional checking processes put in place by Lonely Planet and am satisfied that errors or omissions by accident, negligence or malice would be even less likely to occur; and that the exhaustive review of all work and editions on which Thomas Kohnstamm has worked has identified any inaccuracies for which he is responsible and that immediate steps have been taken to rectify these".

We have found only the kind of minor inaccuracies we would normally expect of guidebook text that was coming up to its review date.

The Caribbean Islands guide and the Chile & Easter Islands guide are both being updated at the moment and new editions of these guides will be out in October and February respectively. Thomas wrote the St Vincent, Grenadines, Barbados and Grenada chapters of the Caribbean Islands guide and the La Araucania & The Lakes District, Chiloe, Aisen & the Carretera Austral, Patagonia & Terra del Fuego and Archipiélago Juan Fernández chapters in the Chile & Easter Island guide. As soon as we have the new updates of these chapters we'll make them available on the Pick & Mix section of our website as free PDFs for download. The Caribbean Islands chapters will be available from 21 July and the Chile & Easter Island chapters will be available from 17 November.

We have contracted one of our authors to replace the chapter that Thomas wrote for our South America on a shoestring guide, and we'll insert the new chapter at the next reprint. It'll be in bookshops by mid-August.

2. Thomas has claimed that he was not paid enough to travel to Colombia when he was employed as an author on our Colombia guide. The fact is that Thomas was not employed as an on-the-ground author on that guidebook. This means that he did not write any reviews - of places or establishments - in this book. His contribution was to the introductory chapter covering history, culture, food and drink and environment. Two on-the-ground authors wrote the reviews for the Colombia guide.

3. Thomas talks most about his work on Brazil (6th edition). This book is out of print and has been replaced by the current edition, Brazil (7th edition). This has been fully updated, and Thomas did not work on it.

4. Thomas claims he was not paid enough by Lonely Planet to do the job without shortcuts. While we ask a lot of our authors, we lead the industry in the fees we pay, and are committed to a yearly review of author fees.

We're confident that the vast majority of our information is sound and accurate. Where we find any problems, we'll make it right by providing new content. We know that you place a huge amount of trust in us, and we will live up to that trust.

If you want to weigh in on the discussion, go to this specially established branch of the Thorn Tree. For more information on Lonely Planet authors, head to our author page.