Shyzer.com

Remember how I went to South America last year and wrote about how horrid Frommer’s Travel Guides are when compared to their Lonely Planet counterpart?

Turns out the guy writing those LP guides made it all up.

A Lonely Planet author says he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay…Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book on his misadventures, also said he didn’t travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because “they didn’t pay me enough,” The Daily Telegraph reported.

“I wrote the book in San Francisco [California],” he is quoted as saying in the Telegraph. “I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”

Kohnstamm has worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including its titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Chile and South America.

Bravo, Frommer’s. Not only do your travel guides suck, but they are worse than the musings of a plagiarizing drug addict. He could have written about his drugged up hallucinations of magical unicorns mauling evil zombies and ninjas and Frommer’s STILL would have sucked more as a travel guide.

How that company stays in business, I’ll never know.