Pretty soon, every publisher and his neighbor were trying to get into this market. People were given deadlines they couldn't meet and amounts of money they couldn't even live off. It's precisely these financial and time restraints that have led one guidebook writer to the dark side of the guide. If you're not being paid well for a project, you can't really expect somebody to go out and break their back. Even though it's a perfectly legal thing to do as long as the prose itself isn't plagiarized, this cheats readers, who are expecting a unique perspective on their chosen destination.
Updates have their own problems.
Airfare and ground transportation would suck up most of that. It could simply mean that he or she has traveled as far as the refrigerator, while calling the phone numbers from the previous year's guide to make sure that they were still accurate. Consider the plight of Chris Baker, who has been writing guidebooks for the last 15 years for Moon, Lonely Planet and Frommer's, among others. Holmes faced a similar problem after being paid the same sum to update a California guide. So he made some phone calls, took information from press releases and relied heavily on his recollection of the places.