What lonely planet are they on?

A few years ago, I wrote a piece about the Lonely Planet guide to Burma. I looked at how the supposedly right-on publishers sweetened the rule of the military so that western tourists could travel with a clean conscience. The crimes of the junta — which had the appropriately sinister name of the Slorc — could be discounted, the guidebook said. Tourists should not worry about the conscripted workers who built their hotels because forced labour is ‘on the wane’. Maybe Lonely Planet had an ideological reason to whitewash dictatorships, I speculated. Or perhaps it was a cheapskate enterprise that did not much care what it published, as long as it could secure maximum profits for minimum outlay.

Thomas Kohnstamm, co-author of Lonely Planet guides to various South American countries, raised the latter possibility when he implied in his memoir, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, that Lonely Planet employees were so stretched they barely grasped the nature of a regime before moving on to the next country.