Rough Guide vs Lonely Planet vs Fodor vs Time Out Guides

But that does illustrate a point - guidebooks are really variable, and one company's guidebook to one place could be great but to another shite. The Time Out guides are an interesting example of this... their ones to San Francisco and Prague are pretty good, but their one to Budapest is appalling, as it sucks any interest out of visiting the place from you. Then you have the Rough Guides - their one to San Francisco is boring and makes the city sound equally boring, but their one for Hungary is full of top stuff.

Does anyone else engage in virtual travel through guide books? Thanks to the Lonely Planet guide to Iceland, Greenland & the Faroe Islands I am a font of amusing anecdotes about the Faroe Islands, without having to go through the hassle of actually visiting the place.

The Cadogan recommendations for hotels / restaurants were bang on, too.

The caveat to this is that if I was trying to make my way around with zero cash the Rough Guide would be my choice.

ANy Lonely planet written by someone who studied at SOAS is usually pretty good in my book.

actual accomodation info = lonely planet

nightlife = time out guides have been spot on for me.

Lonely planet is largely derided amongst "travellers" due to the large number of people arriving in various places around the world and almost liveing their lives by them, but they can still help you out when you aren't sure where to go.

I've never used a Cadogan guide so I'll look out for them, me and Vicky used a couple of Green guides while in France and they were quite smart except that they're arranged alphabetically instead of by area so can be a bit confusing.

I've generally found Rough Guides to be useful for info but if I go on a big trip my wife and I take 2 books so we can see which place gets recomended twice and so we can both be reading them.

Routard seem pretty good if you are in France and want to go to loads of brilliant restaurants. Don't know about anywhere else though.

I used to think that Lonely Planet restaurant recommendations were pretty failsafe (judging by Morocco and Italy this is, the only places I've really had to use one). Then I looked at the Lonely Planet Guide to England, which seemed monumentally half-arsed and cobbled together and full of phrases like "If you fancy a bite to eat in Portsmouth there is a Waitrose on the High Strees, while the burger van opposite the HMS Victory does great hot dogs", while its Canterbury pub recommendations were just plain WRONG.

My friend did this and it was one of the most miserable experiences of her life.

There was a girl who died a couple of years ago working for Let's Go!. I think she was in Venezuela and her bus went off of a cliff. I still wish I'd done it.

(the above opinion is completely unbiased and absolutely nothing to do with the dayjob of kate's current boyfriend, oh no.)

That's not even the worst expurge that had to take place. Apparently, BF didn't do his research properly, and wrote a description (sight unseen, from an interview with a local) that actually sent an unwitting backpacker hiking around a beautiful mountain lake ... in North Korea. Backpacker was promptly arrested and caused an international incident. Rough Guide had to print retraction, correction and another revision. Astonishingly, BF still has his job, and is in fact going back to China again next month.

Full of bizarre / inappropriate references to Quebec politics.

lonely planet england doese not have a section for bradford, it is 'leeds and around'. rough guide england does have a section for bradford

I found the Footprints guidebook for Goa excellent. Better than what I saw of any of the others.

Sometimes, for places that don't get annually updated guidebooks, it can be a matter of choosing the one that happens to be most recent.

I used the Eyewitness Travel Guides from DK publishing, I have the NYC and London ones too. Haven't gotten to use the London one yet, but they worked very well for Rome and NYC. However in both cases I already had lodging sorted out and was spending 10-15 days in that one location. Rome is a tough city to do but in the best way possible--there's so much for nearly every interest. Some of the fun is in figuring it out.

i'd like to go somewhere to ask questions about places, but thorntree/lonelyplanet seems a bit more oriented towards natural wonders and the like, than i am particularly looking for. perhaps 43places.com might work out, but i remain to be convinced about that also.

perhaps you know of a better travel/places board?

More or less unsurprising...

THE Lonely Planet guidebook empire is reeling from claims by one of its authors that he plagiarised and made up large sections of his books and dealt drugs to make up for poor pay.

Thomas Kohnstamm also claims in a new book that he accepted free travel, in contravention of the company's policy.

His revelations have rocked the travel publisher, which sells more than six million guides a year.

Mr Kohnstamm, whose book is titled Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?, said yesterday that he had worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including its titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Chile and South America.

In one case, he said he had not even visited the country he wrote about.

"They didn't pay me enough to go Colombia,'' he said.

"I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian Consulate.

"They don't pay enough for what they expect the authors to do.''

An email to management, posted on the company's authors' forum, describes Mr Kohnstamm's book as "a car crash waiting to happen''.

"Why did you (management) not understand that when you hire a constant stream of new, unvetted people, pay them poorly and set them loose, that someone, somehow was going to screw you?'' author Jeanne Oliver wrote.

Ms Oliver, an experienced travel writer having written for Lonely Planet on eastern Europe, France, Germany and Greece, admitted to sending the email, but did not wish to comment further.

Other writers believe some practices described in the book are widespread. Lonely Planet forbids their authors from accepting gifts or discounts.

Another email, sent in the name of Lonely Planet chief Janet Slater, states that Mr Kohnstamm's books were all being urgently reviewed.

The email said: "If we find that the content has been compromised, we'll take urgent steps to fix it. Once we've got things right for travellers as quickly as we can, we'll look at what we do and how we do it to ensure as best we can, that this type of thing never happens again.''

Lonely Planet publisher Piers Pickard told The Sunday Telegraph that the company's urgent review of Mr Kohnstamm's guidebooks had failed to find any inaccuracies in them.

it would be funny to hear from people who used the guide to colombia and found it actually kinda dece.

just how curvy are the wives anyway?

I heard an interview about this and it's posturing of the highest order from a writer who evidently wants to go down as some kind of travel writing Lester Bangs or something.

Apparently the dude was hired to write about the history of Columbia and had contacts at the Colombian embassy and wasn't involved in the actual travel stuff.

that sounds plausible and paradigmatic: get a name for yourself by fucking up.

going to mexico city for a week at the end of august -- anyone familiar with fodor's or lonely planet guide? 3 days of my trip are taken up by a conference, so i don't even have a ton of time. anyone familiar with mexico city? what should i do in the brief time i have?

(asking only about fodor's or lonely planet since this is what my library has)

in the past i've generally preferred rough guides. right off the bat i'm kind of turned off by the language in the lonley planet guide:

"remember that mexico city is, and has ever been, the sun in the mexican solar systen. to truly understand the country, you've got to come to grips with el gran tenochtitlan" okay thanks but i'm really not going to "truly understand the country" in one trip or even the number of trips a normal reader of lonely planet might take to mexico, nor will i understand the country by visiting this one very large city in a very large country