YOU’VE SEEN THE books on every shelf of travel guides. With its trademark black-and-yellow logo and convenient, portable size, the Let’s Go series is as ubiquitous to the travel section of your local bookstore as are Fodor’s, Frommer’s, and Lonely Planet.

But what sets Let’s Go apart is its staff. Forget professional critics with decades of travel experience under their proverbial belts: from top to bottom, the Let’s Go editors, designers, writers, and researchers are all students at Harvard University. The series was started in 1960 by a group of Harvard students who put together a pamphlet of European travel tips for fellow classmates; 45 years later, Let’s Go is a bona fide travel-guide empire, with 47 books — covering regions from Alaska to Brazil, South Africa to Turkey — in its current catalogue.

Tom Mercer, who started his Let’s Go career while attending Harvard, now works as the series’ project manager at St. Martin’s Press, which has been publishing the books since the early 1980s. With the dollar struggling, airlines battling to stay in business, and in the wake of global events like September 11 and the recent tsunamis, Mercer offers his take on the state — and future — of travel.

Q: Tell me a little about the history of Let’s Go.

A: Let’s Go was started in 1960 by a group of Harvard students. There was not a guide book at that time that was appropriate to backpackers traveling to Europe. They put together a pamphlet, essentially; they sold it for very cheap, on charter flights to Europe. Then it grew into a book after a couple years, and the book is now 45 years old. It’s still going strong, and it’s still run by Harvard students, and it’s a great travel guide for a budget market.

Q: And not necessarily just for students.

A: No, absolutely not. In fact, we’ve added a lot of material in the last few years that’s been aimed at attracting people who are older. It’s a budget-travel guide. We make no bones about that; we’re not going to cover high-end hotels. But we’ve also added more cheap hotels, places where people would feel more comfortable rather than hostels, maybe, if they’re traveling out of college. Though when I was out on the road, I actually found that there are a number of people who are much, much older than me who are still traveling in hostels, so that can be done as well.

Q: Tell me about the process of putting together a guide.

A: An editor is hired at Let’s Go, and they come up with a book plan, and they hire researchers, and those researchers go out, and it’s very intense. It’s an intense two-month process of really digging into the destination that they’re traveling in. Basically the idea is that when they’re out there, they’re really experiencing everything firsthand, exactly the way a traveler would, [so it’s] firsthand, experiential knowledge, from somebody who’s actually walking the walk. A lot of travel-guide writers know their destinations, but they don’t necessarily experience them on an everyday basis.

Q: How are the staffs determined?

A: You’d be amazed at the group of students and the experiences that they have, in terms of the people who are selected as editors and writers for Let’s Go. People who have previous travel experience to the destination, to the region, are given preference in terms of being selected. So we do get a group of people that has expertise on the region.

Q: I would imagine some writers are better than others, and some destinations are more plum than others, too.

A: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s Go is definitely known, probably because our flagship book is the Europe book, for being a European guidebook series; we have books to all over the world now, though, and I found when I worked there, the best strategy for me was to apply to [write for] books that were a little bit more off the beaten path. Those tended also to be the books that attracted me.

Q: How off-the-beaten path does Let’s Go go?

A: We’ve got books to Peru, Ecuador, Thailand, Costa Rica, China, Chile, Central America, Southeast Asia.

Q: The whole staff turns over every year; is that a chaotic process?

A: It’s not chaotic. I think actually, in a lot of ways, it’s revitalizing. I see it as a benefit, because it basically reinvigorates the organization every year. Every year you have fresh blood. This is true also of the research; every year you have somebody else going over the route that the previous person had done. And that person might have a different strength or a different focus or different ideas about the destination, and that all gets infused into that book.

Q: In the many years since Let’s Go has been around, what have been some of the biggest changes in the travel industry?

A: I would say that the world has gotten smaller. And that’s why we started with a list of mainly European titles, and we’ve really expanded to include titles all over the globe. This is by necessity. Our new books this year are Ecuador, Peru, and Vietnam. The previous year we added Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Japan. It’s important to cover more than just the European countries. That’s how we started, because that was kind of the classic student trip, to go to Europe. People still do that, and that’s still definitely a strength for us. People have not stopped going to Europe. But they do go other places now.

Q: What kinds of adjustments, if any, did the company make in the wake of September 11?

A: One of the things that’s come to the fore since September 11, and which I think is kind of a result of September 11, although kind of tangentially, is that we’ve added a lot of information on volunteerism and alternatives to tourism and kind of more meaningful study/work/volunteer vacations in our books, because we’ve actually found that people are interested in having more meaningful vacations. And I think that that has something to do with September 11; I think people realize that their actions abroad really do have an effect on the way the US is perceived globally. And they want to be involved, and they want to understand other cultures, I think. Even if there are certain segments of the population that want to be more isolationist in the wake of that, I think the overwhelming theme is that we want to be more involved.