Margo Classé

Margo Classe’s bio

Impact of travel on writer's hard life speaks volumes

Margo Classé has written guidebooks to Italy, France and other countries. But she's not planning on covering one place she knows all too well.

Simply put, she's been to hell and back. Classé's childhood reads like a modern-day Dickens story: Abandoned by her mother at the age of 4, she was shuttled off to a New York City orphanage, where she lived on and off until adulthood. Nuns beat her. An alcoholic stepfather sexually abused her. She got sent to a mental hospital. She got hooked on heroin.

That her story has a happy ending is powerful testimony to how travel can alter the trajectories of our lives. Now 49, Classé has carved out a niche for herself in the ever-more-crowded travel guidebook field by self-publishing guides to affordable hotels in Europe. I have several of her titles on my shelves, and it wasn't until my eyes happened to fall on the author's profile in the back of her "Hello France! " that I had any idea of her story.

Social workers, she told me, couldn't find a family to adopt her, possibly because she was of mixed race, she thinks, or because her mother wouldn't sign the papers. She went to live in St. Dominic's Orphanage with 500 other kids under the care of what she called "strict and abusive nuns."

She fought with the nuns, fought with the other children and cried herself to sleep every night, praying her mother would come and take her away.

To help pay for her keep, the orphanage sent Classé out to clean homes. One day, while dusting some bookshelves, she pulled out a book and started reading.

It was a travel book, and for the first time in her life Classé began to realize there was a world beyond orphanages and social service agencies. She was 13.

"I started reading about faraway places to escape my life," she said. "And I'd listen to stories (by the family whose home she was cleaning) about their vacations and travels. Up until then, the only exposure I had to the world was the continuing cycle of broken welfare families. You got pregnant, got married or not married, you got pregnant again and went on welfare."

Back at the orphanage, things grew worse. Classé attacked a nun with a pair of scissors and was sent to a mental hospital, where her roommate introduced her to marijuana. Eventually she moved on to cocaine, methamphetamines, LSD and finally heroin. She and some friends were arrested as they tried to use credit cards they had stolen.

But Classé came to realize that wanderlust eased her pain in a way that no narcotic could. She began spending every spare moment in the New York City library, "escaping my reality by reading about other countries and cultures."

As soon as she was old enough to leave the orphanage, Classé boarded a plane for Puerto Rico. "I went by myself," she said. "I had no hotel reservations, very little money and spoke no Spanish -- and I had the best time. I was smitten! No one knew anything about me. It made me feel I was no different from anyone else.

"I was hooked on the experience of not knowing anyone or my surroundings, of getting lost with strangers. I was able to navigate my way on foreign soil with very little effort. It gave me the confidence to tackle the unknown."

Classé earned a university degree in business, moved to Los Angeles, got married and continued traveling. She began researching and writing guidebooks because she couldn't find anything on the bookstore shelves that delivered what she and her husband needed: an exhaustive guide to good, inexpensive European hotels.

"We didn't need a book on seeing the sights. There were plenty that did that," she said. "But there were no books that gave dozens of hotel choices in the budget price category."

Classé now self-publishes four books: "Hello Italy!" "Hello France!" "Hello Spain!" and "Hello Britain & Ireland!" Each is packed with listings for budget hotels, most of them less than $100 a night.

The research she puts into her books is staggering. Most guidebook authors poke their noses into a room or two, but Classé tries to personally inspect every room in every hotel she lists. That's how she can tell her readers, for example, that at the Hotel Aldini in Florence, room 105 faces the street, while room 102 has a partial view of the Duomo. Or that at the Blauvac in Avignon, you get a shower in room 12B and a bathtub in room 19.

A few bookstores carry Classe's titles, but mostly she sells them herself, through her Web site, www.HelloEurope.com or her toll-free number: (888) 663- 9269.

Don't buy them because they're tangible evidence of how travel turned around a troubled life; buy them because they're some of the best guides around to affordable hotels in Europe. The other part is just a nice bonus. E-mail John Flinn at travel@sfchronicle.com.

Margo Classé’s philosophy on how she travels.