Turns out Google didn’t sell social followers back to Arthur Frommer

A small mystery emerged this evening and got solved quickly as well: turns out when Google sold back the Frommer’s brand name to founder Arthur Frommer, the social accounts and its followers weren’t part of that deal. This was discovered this evening when some Twitter users found out that the @FrommersTravel handle, with all its 295K followers, was deleted and then later the followers were transferred over to @ZagatTravel.

Also deleted: Frommer’s Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare, Google+, Pinterest accounts, and likely the followers will resurface in equivalent Zagat travel accounts from Google.

We have it on good authority that a good samaritan quickly re-registered the @FrommersTravel twitter account and is now transferring it back to Arthur/Pauline Frommer. We hope someone’s doing it for other deleted accounts as well.

In this piece of news emerges the new brand: ZagatTravel. This makes sense since Google has been consolidating all travel and local information services under the Zagat name, when it bought the brand to years ago. In early March, Zagat’s travel blog began publishing stories more frequently than before. Many of these stories are based on content previously published on Frommers.com.

Google owns ZagatTravel.com domain, even though we think unlikely it will create a separate site under than domain.

This account is now @ZagatTravel! Welcome. Stay tuned for info on where to go, where to stay and how to explore around the world.

— Zagat Travel (@ZagatTravel) April 9, 2013