I remember in the heady days of the early nineties I did much traveling and Lonely Planet guidebooks were the travel guidebooks for the discerning, independent traveler. The company was still relatively small and their books didn’t even cover half the world, ignoring the first world and focusing on the gritty wonders of exotic, distant locales.
While Frommer’s/Fodor’s/Etc. seemed so stuffy and detached, Lonely Planet really seemed to have its thumb on the pulse with the best, most current, almost “inside” information, if you will. Was that really true at the time or was that a constructed myth into which we bought at the time?
Now, Lonely Planet is as large as any other corporation. They churn out an expansive, multimedia product line. When one visits the Eiffel Tower/Trafalgar Square/[Insert Tourist Hot Spot Here] everyone and their dog has his/her nose buried in a Lonely Planet guidebook. It wasn’t always like this.
Have Lonely Planet become what they most feared? Have they jumped the shark? When? How does their product fare against its current competitors?
We love, love, love, travel books and have a large collection of 'em. Preparing for our trip to India, we had pretty much one of each; Fodor’s, Frommer’s, DK, Lonely Planet, Footprint, Rough Guide, National Geographic, and Let’s Go. It was a bit of info overkill.
DK is by far the best guide book for sight seeing. The pictures and details and history is the most encyclopedic and useful to the point of being a tour guide.
Lonely Planet is the best printed guide for restaurants and hotels, however, its information is surpassed online by TripAdvisor. Frommer’s comes in a close second (I’ve never found it that stuffy). But if one finds Frommer’s and its ilk to be stuffy, Lonely Planet has changed so it’s not that different from its competitors.
I don’t understand - just because they’re popular means that they’re not good anymore?
FWIW, I still think they’re the best for the budget traveller. If you’re staying in a nice hotel and renting a car and eating at white tablecloth restaurants, you don’t read LP, you read…I don’t know, because I don’t do that shit. But if you’re staying in hostels and looking for cheap places for lunch, Lonely Planet is the way to go.
ETA: Unless you’re going to a place they don’t cover very well. I went to Bosnia a couple years ago and LP’s Western Balkans book - NOT VERY HELPFUL. Brandt publishes a really good Bosnia & Herzegovina-only book that helped immensely. Thank you, Amazon reviewers for pointing that out to me!
I’m currently reading a couple of Lonely Planet books, in preparation for our trip to France this summer. Sadly, I’m encountering quite a few mistakes. For example, sights on their maps are given numbers that don’t correspond to the numbers in the key. And there are mistakes in the index; entire towns that aren’t mentioned, or have the wrong page numbers; or listings that refer to the wrong map. And someone should tell them that it’s hard to read type on a gray background.
It depends entirely on where you are going and what you are looking for.
If you are looking for youth hostels and backpacker haunts, Lonely Planet is the way to find them. Exactly which budget travel book is best varies by country since the books vary so much. But there isn’t a huge difference between Lonely Planet and Rough Guide in most cases. In any case, it’s not like there is any real alternative- either you get a budget guide, a normal guide, or you do it without a guide. There are no hipper underground guides hanging around.
You can’t win with backpackers. The moment they like something, they hate it because other people like it. The whole mentality seems silly to me. There are no more untouched places, and if there are it’s probably because they suck, and if you want to go there you are just going to have to find it on your own.
I prefer obsessively researching TripAdvisor and supplementing with a picture heavy but information dense (at least on cultural sights, things to see and do) book like one put out by National Geographic. Honestly, you can’t beat Tripadvisor, Flickr and a good google search when it comes to travel. My brother-in-law’s grad thesis was on PDAs and he got hundreds of them free when he was writing it so he downloads maps and stuff for us and gives us one anytime we travel. It came in really handy when I was in Belize and the upside is that he doesn’t care if we lose them. This more or less eliminated the last remaining use for a guidebook, at least for me.
I was just thinking this the other day - my first trip to Europe, LP was my bible and it was extremely helpful. But just recently I went to Crete and was disappointed by LP - it was missing a lot of information about roads and such. I think the biggest difference, though, might have been that we were driving around this time, whereas last time I was taking buses and trains. LP is still pretty good when it comes to recommeding restaurants though. We weren’t disappointed with any of their dining suggestions.
I’ve always heard the Thailand guide is LP’s best seller. A new one comes out every two years, but after only a year, or even six months, the information is often sometimes out of date. That’s because Thailand is so dynamic. On the other hand, I was once told you could look at a 10-year-old LP for India, and it would still be valid, as nothing ever changes there. Just about anywhere we’ve gone in Asia, we’ve seen many tourists lugging around their LP.
We still like LP best and always buy the new Thailand guide when it comes out. We’re about due for another one in a few months. We don’t rely on it solely, though. But it is the only guidebook we buy. Everything else comes from the Internet, newspapers or recommendations.
I lost respect for them after their guide to my area was released. When contacted by the local paper regarding several glaring factual errors, their response was that it was the author’s opinion and they wouldn’t make alterations. Opinions are all well and good but facts are facts, and he was factually incorrect.
I’ve never used LP books, so I can’t really say how they compare, but I have to shill for my favorite here. For eating cheap and sleeping in train stations, I can’t imagine anything beating Let’s Go. I did six weeks in Europe with a Eurail pass, a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s, a pair of hiking boots, and practically no budget, and LG was my bible. It never* let me down.
*Well it let me down once. Pretty hard. In Vienna. But there was only a little bit of blood, and it never let me down again.
LPs are generally pretty good. The Iran guide was a lifesaver as I got the new version just 2 days before my leaving home. The Caucasus guide was not so good (I lived there for a while).
Overall the single country guides to out-of-the-way places are seemingly the best ones. I try to avoid places like London/Paris/Rome, opting for something more along the lines of Tehran/Kampala/Vientiane.
I’ve found the Lonely Planet books to be helpful, but a bit too “lefty-backpacker” for me to use as the sole source of itinerary suggestions.
The thing is, if you want a travel guidebook in this country, Lonely Planet books are about the only ones you’re likely to find- you’ve really got to go looking to find a Rough Guide or Frommer’s or Let’s Go guide for sale around here, at least in my experience.
This is true - I used a Rough Guide when I was in Turkey because it was a tiny bit cheaper than the Lonely Planet and it served me very well. (ETA: Although its map of Istanbul made me want to punch the editor. Would it really be so difficult to include the tram stops?)
One funny moment was when I was thumbing through it in the lobby of my hostel and another traveler said “Whoa, that doesn’t look like a normal Lonely Planet.” Apparently it had never occurred to her that someone might use a different guide. Heh.
LP used to be my go-to for guidebooks, but I’ve noticed the quality has really started to decline over the past few years. Here are the last four I bought:
Good:
Andalucia (never steered us wrong for food, lodging or stuff to see/do)
Meh:
Barcelona (next to useless - redeemed by the fact that it did suggest an awesome hostel right near the MACBA)
Bad:
NYC (useless unless you want to spend all your time in Brooklyn and Williamsburg with the hipsters, and want to sleep in bedbug riddled hostels)
Toronto (unbelievably bad restaurant recommendations)
Lately, I’ve found I get better results from a combination of Chowhound (for food), TripAdvisor (for hotels) and Flickr (for places to see/go). It’s just not worth it to spend the $20-$30 for the LP guide… most of the time, they’re too focused on the dirt-cheap or super-trendy, with very little in the middle (which is where my preferences happen to fall)
Well, that was interesting to me, because I went to Colombia (the country in question) in February and used the Lonely Planet guide. It was incredibly helpful, especially with restaurant suggestions. I don’t think the hostel suggestions were as helpful - we googled for the places we stayed.
FWIW, Lonely Planet claims that this dude was only hired to write the history section anyway. Which was very good. Gave excellent context for what we saw, especially because Colombians weren’t really chatty about their history.
Actually, I’ve been hearing the same complaints about LP literally for decades now, but they still keep chugging along. No doubt 20 years from now, similar remarks will still be made.