Let's Go Travel Guides
| Industry | Publications |
|---|---|
| Genre | Travel guides |
| Founded | 1960 |
| Founder | Oliver Koppell Harvard Student Agencies |
| Headquarters | Cambridge, MA, USA |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
| Products | Travel guidebooks |
| Parent | Harvard Student Agencies |
| Website | http://www.letsgo.com/ |
Let's Go is a travel guide series researched, written, edited, and run entirely by students at Harvard University. The first of the budget/backpacker-oriented travel guides,Let's Go promotes itself as "the student travel guide" but is aimed at readers "both young and young at heart".Let's Go was founded in 1960 and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The first Let's Go guide was a 25-page mimeographed pamphlet put together by an 18-year-old Harvard freshman named Oliver Koppell and handed out on student charter flights to Europe; the first professionally published guide was issued in 1961. Early guides tended to be freewheeling—for example, advising travelers on motorbiking through Southeast Asia in the late 1960s and financing travel in Europe by singing in the street. The first edition described how to travel from Europe to Asia on just four cents: by taking the ferry across the Bosphorus, from the European to the Asian side of the city of Istanbul, Turkey.
As the guide became more popular throughout the 1960s, increasing quantities were printed every year. Let's Go also commissioned an artist, Richard Copaken, to give the series a logo: its trademark hot-air balloon. (That other Let's Go logo, the hitchhiker thumb, did not appear until 1973.) Maps and a "general introduction" section (the "Before You Go" of modern guidebooks) were added, and the venture went national. Sales skyrocketed after Let's Go Business Manager Andrew Tobias promoted the books on the Today show in 1966.
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Wikipedia