Travel well, Mr Frommer, you cheapskate. I’m a tight-arsed globetrotter thanks to you

The death of Arthur Frommer ends not just a life but the inspiration for a way of living. Frommer, who died on Monday at 95, was the superhero of cheap travel. His Europe on $5 a Day, published in 1957, democratised travel for generations who thought the continent was out of their reach. He said, “You were told by the entire travel industry that the only way to go to Europe was first-class [and] that it literally wasn’t safe to stay anywhere other than first-class hotels.”

First-class, he said, was a waste of money and not even real travel. “The moment you put yourself in a first-class hotel, you become walled off from life, in a world devoted to creature comforts. 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.”

Arthur Frommer in 1987.Credit: Tim Bauer/Fairfax Media

Thanks to inflation, by 1983 his guide was Frommer’s Europe on $25 a Day. By 1994 it was $50, and in 2004 it became Frommer’s Europe from $85 a Day. The changed preposition, from, said a lot, and by 2016, the guide was just Frommer’s Europe. So ended the dollar figure, but Frommer’s ideal lasted.

For most of the world, living cheaply is not a choice. For the traveller, it’s a privilege. Frommer knew that, but to his middle-class Western readers, he argued that frugality was a choice that too many were squibbing, to their detriment.

I backpacked as a 22-year-old, stretching out a year on $4000 ($11 a day might have been taking cheapness too far, but you could always dream). The US dollar was double the Aussie and I used Let’s Go guides because Frommer’s was too upmarket, but it was Frommer who put everywhere on your itinerary. You just had to be sufficiently tight-arsed.

Travel, he said, is best not when it is an escape from stress, but when it’s about problem-solving; when the travellers have to make decisions and sacrifices that bring them into contact with unexpected people and risks they wouldn’t try at home. Travel could only broaden the mind, Frommer said, in economy-class.

If it’s true for travel, what about life? I’ve always admired a certain kind of tightwad – takes one to know one. The beauty of frugality is not Scrooge-like meanness or a way to build riches. It’s not even about consistency (if you don’t bend, you break). It’s about weighing pros and cons and finding your honest level. It’s an independence of spirit.

I loved how IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad flew economy and drove an ancient Volvo even though he was the eighth-richest person on Earth. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man, never upgraded his house, his car or his wardrobe because he’d tried luxury and was authentic enough to admit that it did nothing for him. When he died last year, he left his billions to charity. He sincerely thought he would be harming his children by taking economy out of their thinking.

Cheapskates get a bad name, with a revealing selectiveness. Frommer was Jewish, and bigotry about money, like any bigotry, can be a step on the road to evil. Why did children in monocultural Sydney call a cheapskate a “Jew” though they knew none? Where did they learn that insult? Why was calling a cheapskate “typically Scottish” so much less demeaning? Middle-class Australia’s history of antisemitic name-calling is deeper and darker than it likes to think.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

Arthur Frommer said travelling on a budget meant: “You should travel in a state of humility, asking more questions than making points.” A cap of five, 25 or 85 dollars a day produced this humility. When I drove a car across America for free – I was delivering it to its owner – and travelled extra distance to find the cheapest motel or the nastiest hostel, I was exposed to the education that only humility can buy. It’s the one year of my life of which I can remember every single day. From my privileged retrospectivity, I miss frugality’s constant challenge. I also miss being 22.

Choosing to be cheap is not on the same planet as having to be cheap. But choosing cheap is not the emptiest middle-class indulgence. With thrift, you examine your impact on the earth. Voluntary thrift can be a way of using your advantages to minimise harm.

As with anything, there are limits. I get accused of hypocrisy whenever I end up choosing luxury and enjoying it. My response is that it’s the rarity I enjoy; routine luxury, on the other hand, is a drug of addiction, delivering less and less, demanding more and more.

Arthur Frommer derided first-class flying. Except for the aged, infirm and those on a once-in-a-lifetime blowout, when I see people flying first-class to London, I’m not thinking, “Wow, how successful/lucky are they!” No, I’m thinking, “What kind of prize dill would value 24 hours of comfort at $15,000? Is it the same prize dill who also chooses an Uber to save $10, or blows up about a $6 coffee? The dill who is ridiculously extravagant and ridiculously cheap at the same time?”

What Frommer left was not an absolutist or puritanical idea that parsimony equals virtue. It never has. One of Aesop’s fables told about the miser who buried his gold and came to look at it every day. It got stolen; to cheer himself up, the miser buried a rock and came to look at that every day.

The Greeks were onto the unhealthy attachment to money. But Frommer’s message was never about thrift for its own sake. He fitted frugality into a scheme of problem-solving that led to treasure. You didn’t have to give up hope of seeing the world just because you weren’t loaded. You could see the same Eiffel Tower and the same Colosseum as the rich were seeing, only you saw it through sharper and more appreciative eyes. It’s a modern story, and I’m glad Frommer got to live to such a ripe old age. I bet he got a bargain.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist and an author and a columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.