Real budget travel? It doesn’t exist any more

Few people get to leave their mark on the travel world like Arthur Frommer. The founder of the Frommer’s guidebook empire – and the founder of the very idea of budget travel – died recently at the age of 95, and leaves behind an enviable legacy.

Frommer pioneered budget travel in the 1950s with the release of his book Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, a tome that opened Americans’ eyes to a whole different way of seeing the world outside the five-star, grand-tour experience that was the norm then, available to only the lucky, wealthy few.

Arthur Frommer in Australia in 1991.Credit: Kylie Anee Pickett

Frommer’s book helped democratise travel, while also encouraging a more immersive style, one that eschewed the hermetically-sealed luxury experience in favour of a more immersive, thoughtful approach. He was a little like our own Tony Wheeler, the founder of Lonely Planet, though he didn’t just spread word of a movement, he started the whole thing.

Perhaps unfortunately, or perhaps impressively, Frommer also lived long enough to see that movement boom, and then begin to disappear. Because budget travel, Frommer’s budget travel, isn’t the same as it used to be.

How many people rough it when they travel these days? How many people really put up with discomfort in the name of saving a few bucks?

You might be thinking that you do. You fly Jetstar all the time, right? And in that sense, yes, budget travel has never been more popular. There have never been so many options for people who would like to travel long distances and not spend much money.

Budget travellers demand higher standards from their trips these days.Credit: iStock

But I’m talking about the real, challenging budget travel. The super-cheap digs in Bangkok with mattresses on the floor; those grand, overland bus adventures from London to Kathmandu; the down-and-dirty camping tours around Europe.

Those things don’t exist anymore. Or at least, they don’t form part of the mainstream, even for young, budget-conscious travellers, whose tastes have shifted, particularly in the past 20 years or so.

There’s a desire now (and a demand) for better. Comfort is important to travellers of all ages, approaches and budgets. Quality of experience is important.

Online reviews mean even the cheapest places have to have their facilities up to scratch now, with modern amenities and comforts, or no one will go there. Social media means travellers need to have something beautiful or exciting to capture on their journey, an experience to provoke envy, rather than make all your friends at home – and your followers around the world – feel sorry for you.

Bad news about budget travel also moves fast these days. The absolutely devastating deaths of Australian teenagers Holly Bowles and Bianca Jones last week, the result of suspected methanol poisoning in Laos, will have many people reconsidering their destination and their style of travel.

There’s something else that has changed, too, since Arthur Frommer first stuffed a few changes of clothes in a backpack and set off to explore the world. And that is that success in the travel world, for those of us who work in it, looks different now.

Frommer was an influencer of his day, even if he never would have used such a word. He was highly successful too, and the result of that success was being able to disseminate his message, being able to publish books and create an empire, to make a very good living selling his original idea of travel.

It tends not to work like that these days. Success in travel means you garner attention on social media (a few old-school writers are even lucky enough to be published in a newspaper), and you begin to make money through sponsored campaigns, creating content for yourself or for various organisations.

People don’t buy guidebooks anymore, they consume content, so you have to figure out how to make money from that content. That means that even if you began your career as a budget traveller, you’re probably not going to keep going that way. The jobs you’re offered and the products sold by those with enough money to pay you do not conform to that “budget” ethic.

I could put myself forward as a case in point here. I began my career writing about travel as “The Backpacker”, describing the no-frills style of travel that I loved. But then a form of success comes and you start getting offered things like nice hotel rooms and the occasional business-class upgrade – and who’s going to knock back an upgrade?

Maybe Arthur Frommer did. Certainly, he stuck to his ideological guns through an entire lifetime.

“The moment you put yourself in a first-class hotel, you become walled off from life, in a world devoted to creature comforts,” Frommer told the Associated Press in 2007. “When you go to sleep, you no longer know whether you’re in a one-star or a five-star hotel. Big rooms and amenities are all sheer nonsense.”

And Frommer persuaded so many people across the world, across generations, to see travel in the same way. Few can claim an achievement like that.