The Cultured Girl

I’m a huge fan of the Lonely Planet travel guides, with their snarky, no-nonsense advice and off-the-beaten path recommendations on everything from the best place to buy shrooms in Amsterdam to an ancient Parisian restaurant once frequented by Victor Hugo. It seemed the only thing cooler than traveling with a Lonely Planet book would be actually writing one, and tromping around an unfamiliar city on a travel publisher’s dime.

But according to this New York Times story, I should probably withhold my envy, because apparently travel writing is anything but a paid vacation. After all, “many of the intrepid young writers scouring the planet doing research for next year’s crop of guidebooks never stopped to consider what those jobs would entail, other than the romantic — and often overstated — prospect of being paid to travel.” Rather than wander leisurely and taking clever notes, writers for companies like Let’s Go are expected to pack in about a week’s worth of tourist activities in a single day. And since the writer is often charged with documenting the sketchy areas of town, it often means wading into very unfamiliar waters with little salary to show for it. According to the NYT, “MTV and Frommer’s, for example, are collaborating to publish a budget travel series for Europe for which they are paying writers $1,500 for roughly 150 pages of work.”