"THE Lonely Planet guidebook empire is reeling from claims by one of its authors that he plagiarised and made up large sections of his books and dealt drugs to make up for poor pay… In one case, he said he had not even visited the country he wrote about.
“They didn’t pay me enough to go Colombia,” he said. “I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian Consulate. They don’t pay enough for what they expect the authors to do."

Lonely Planet’s bad trip | The Daily Telegraph