Beginning publication in 1998, AFBT was a travel glossy that was ground-breaking because unlike most others at its level (most notably Condé Nast Traveler and Travel+Leisure) because it was firmly focused on travel for regular people, not the well-heeled. Arthur and his staff (including myself, starting as senior editor and ending up as executive editor) took the "budget" in the title very seriously, and was present in every article we researched, reported, and published - for example, we rarely covered lodging costing more than 100USD a night unless it was as an occasional "splurge." Once I was sent to Paris to review all of the city´s budget Ibis hotels (I don´t recall how many, but it was dozens, and it was no easy task, as many of them were extremely similar, differing only by location).
Within a couple of years, Budget Travel was sold to Newsweek; I left in 2002 to move to Miami, and Arthur himself parted company with the magazine several years after that due to creative differences (especially pressure to make its coverage not quite to relentlessly budget-oriented - which he refused to do as a matter of principle. In 2010 the magazine was again sold, to a Wall Street investor, who ended up shuttering it in 2012.The story was not over, however, because in 2014 Lonely Planet bought Budget Travel´s assets and revived the brand as a multi-media platform minus Arthur´s name..
Read more in my post A Tribute to My Friend, the Late Travel-Media Icon Arthur Frommer.
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