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Luke A. Williams ’23 was offered $15,000 and a college student’s dream: the chance to travel the world.
The summer after his freshman year, Williams pounded pavement in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, visiting hundreds of attractions, hotels, and restaurants.
Such was the life of a researcher-writer for Let’s Go, a travel guide written and produced by student members of Harvard Student Agencies. In decades past, Let’s Go was a well-known publication, appearing in Seinfeld and on the cover of the Economist. It counts acclaimed novelist Elif Batuman ’99, radio host Peter D. Sagal ’87, and food writer and YouTube personality Claire J. Saffitz ’09 — a former Crimson Arts editor — among its former employees.
Today, it has all but disappeared from travelers’ pockets, from the internet, and from Harvard’s campus. Its demise was seemingly caused by a perfect storm of flagging sales, a structure of high staff turnover, increasing competition from other travel companies like Lonely Planet and the growing army of travel influencers, a structure of high staff turnover, and the utter disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic.
HSA did not respond to a request for comment.
G. Oliver Koppell ’62 founded Let’s Go as a Harvard freshman, first as a pamphlet in 1959, then as a full guide in 1960.
“I meet people all the time that when I tell them I founded ‘Let’s Go.’ They often say to me ‘Oh! We used that! That was great. We used that when we first went to Europe!’” he says. “I’ve heard that dozens of times during my life.”
In the decades following its founding, Let’s Go steadily grew, reaching its peak in the late ’90s and early 2000s. By 2005, the Let’s Go website claimed a repertoire of over 50 titles translated into seven languages, with destinations for intrepid travelers on six continents. By 2009, the website claimed over 3.5 million guides sold in a decade. Now in his 80s, Koppel described Let’s Go as one of his top life accomplishments,
Though the organization is now defunct, in the 2000s, business was booming. With a staff of more than 90 employees and enough funds to send dozens of researcher-writers abroad, Let’s Go made a significant impact on campus life.
One Crimson article from 2000 mocked the supposed glamor of working for the guide, portraying the “r-dubs” as overworked and lonely and the offices in Cambridge as plagued by brutal editing sessions, favoritism, and intrigue.
But a Crimson article from 2007 suggested ill omens for the beloved travel guide, documenting the publication’s split from longtime publisher St. Martin’s Press. The global shift into digital media portended hard times for Let’s Go, facing the encroaching obsolescence of print travel guides.
The death blow came during the pandemic, when international travel was shut down. At the start of Covid-19 pandemic, Brammy Rajakumar ’23 had been recently hired to oversee all publications and was about to start searching for the next crop researcher-writers. “Based on the Harvard travel policies and the fact that students wouldn’t even be allowed to stay on campus, let alone travel, we couldn’t, in good faith, send anybody out to travel in Europe that year,” she says.
Rajakumar stepped back from the organization after her term ended, and, when students returned to campus en masse in fall 2021, Let’s Go never resurfaced.
Some at Harvard mourn the disappearance of Let’s Go.” “Many of the writers felt that their work with ‘Let’s Go’ was a very important part of their education actually. And some of them became journalists and they were pushed in that direction because of their work,” Koppell says.
“It changed the way that I travel in that I like to really spend time with the city now. The idea of Euro tripping and spending two days in Budapest makes me shiver,” Williams says. “But also, nothing built my confidence and independence and curiosity and wonder like this job did. Oh, it was really something special.”
“I wish that I was still around so that other people at Harvard would have the chance to have a once in a lifetime summer,” says Megan Galbreath ’20, who spent the summer before her senior year traveling Germany and Austria for Let’s Go.
HSA still lists Let’s Go as one of its subsidiaries, but contains only a short bio of the organization and a broken hyperlink. With the erasure of Let’s Go from the internet, writers like Williams and Galbreath lost the blog they’d toiled on, which Williams said he would occasionally look at and reference in job applications.
HSA leadership did not respond to several requests for comment.
Koppell was upset with the news that Let’s Go is now gone. “I just learned about a year ago that they had discontinued. I was very disappointed and shocked to hear it. I don’t know why they didn’t continue it, at least on the internet,” he says. “Now I think that HSA is doing tours of the Harvard campus, I think that’s a lot less interesting.”
As we speak, Williams becomes animated, recalling his adventures with passion and excitement. “It was literally everything that I had wanted to do for years of my life,” he says. “It makes me so sad that it’s gone.”
