Which guide book: Lonely Planet, Rough Guide or another?

JC4LAB

I am a great fan of the old Lonely planets when they first came out..Peter Wheeler had a great almost spiitual perception of the places he visited..nowadays they seem to hire freelance authors with many different styles

fatboyonadiet

Rough guide any day of the week!

Ast_3

As a rule we use Lonely Planet while travelling, but that is only really because they are the first one we bought and we are used to them. We have successfully used them in Africa, Asia, North and South America, first and third world, not Europe yet thought I think...
There appears to be a standard approach to the grading of hotels and eateries across all of the LP books. We also find it easy to understand the layout and to find information if we are in a hurry, again I think this is simpley because we know the layout.
When planning the trips we use a number from the library, but I must admit we do get drawn back to LP anyway.

Maybe going for one brand/publisher whichever one is good enough?

GlennTheBaker

I've used the DK Eyewitness guides and have found them to be superb.

pin

Like others here, I like reading travel books for the sake of reading them (and then hopefully actually going to the country)!

I've normally stuck to Lonely Planet as a rule, but have dabbled with others and have found certain books are great for certain areas. For example I used Lets Go for California, NZ and Australia and thought it was great for those areas. However it seems Asia is covered best by Lonely Planet.

In Switzerland had the choice of using Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. Found Rough Guide very opionated, which I did not like one bit. Actually it came to a point that if the Rough Guide author didn't like something, we went to that place or did what the author did not like.

Have also used the Time Out city guides and think they are brilliant. They seem to be good if you are staying somewhere a bit long term (which is what i'm doing).

Carol_2

Think it depends on your budget. Travelled around Central America few years ago with both Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide. The Rough Guide was so useless I ended up swapping it for a trashy novel to read on long chicken-bus rides!!

For weekend city breaks I still rely on LP for interesting & quirky places to eat/go/stay. I love the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness guides but find them too big to carry about

Neil_G_4

We took, LP and rough guide to NZ and generally prefered the rough guide. The rough guide had more character, whereas the LP felt more like like a directory. Try to borrow couple of different ones from the library to see which style you prefer. Also, Have a look at your hometown in the different guides to get a better feel of what they cover.

Neil

vanoonoo

oooh I love guide books and tend to take advantage of my local library and the net for info intitally then I buy whichever guide book appears to cover the things I want to do.

at a quick glance I have a rough guide to california which includes las vegas and the grand canyon (which arent in cali), fodors newmexico which has been brilliant, an aa pocket guide to crete, another rough guide, this time to iceland, an aa essential iceland, and a discovery channel insight guide for vietnam. oh just spotted frommers colorado and new york for less which included a pass card and loads of discount vouchers.

empfun

I would highly recommend https://www.virtualtourist.com! You can see the travel logs, tips, advice, warnings, basically everything from the many travellers registered on the site. Unbiased opinions of travellers just like yourself.

You might even want to create your own logs and share your experiences. Cheers and all the best!