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Title: Lonely Planet Greece (Lonely Planet. Greece 6th Ed) by Carolyn Bain, David Willett, Michael Clark, Des Hannigan, Paul Hellander, Jeanne Oliver ISBN: 1-74059-470-3 Publisher: Lonely Planet Pub. Date: March, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Thorough Account of Greece for the Hard-Core Traveller
Comment: This book offers engaging information and useful tidbits. It's more upscale than "Let's Go," but at 800 pages, offers more complete listings. It includes sets of attractive colored pictures. The maps are in black and white but very detailed. This guide provides practical information designed to get you around Greece. It includes information on ferry time tables and offers a range of places to stay and dine.
Rating: 4
Summary: Just OK.
Comment: This review compares the Lonely Plantet Greece (4th Edition) with the Rough Guide Greece (8th edition). We spent 2.5 weeks in July, 2001 in Greece, our first visit, and these were our guide books.
A relucant 4 stars to each, and a slight preference for RG. We certainly found the books serviceable, and they gave us good ideas of where in Greece we wanted to go. But they were much less valuable in their listings for individual destinations. They were the least valuable compared to the other LP and RG travel books we've used (Portugal, Italy, Thailand, Tokyo).
As usual, they both overstate their hotel rankings which to me make sense only if you've been sleeping out on the beach from necessity, and now have finally scraped some money together for a room. An exagerration, but I've lost patience with gushing praise for facilities which are usually no better than serviceable and sometimes less than that. And, we're not into spending money on fancy accommodations. Occassionaly the books are on the money, but often not.
On the smaller islands RG usually had more accommodation listings, but occassionally LP did. There were at least two instances when LP had none, just saying that rooms were available.
The ferry schedules in the books, pretty much consistent between them, bore little relation to reality, even though we were there in the high season.
I want to complete with my usual gripe about these and other guide books: we don't know which restaurants and hotels were actually visited by the writers (and by which one) and when. To paraphrase from my review of RG Portugal:
LP is out front in saying that its reviewers do not stay at all the hotels or eat at all the restaurants they list. I would like it if the reviews would be initialized by the reviewers with the date. This would allow us to learn each reviewer's tastes and standards, not to mention seeing which places they actually visited.
One LP writer (not I think an author of this book) in discussing restaurants wrote: "As one of those LP writers I can tell you that it is not physically possible to eat even a 'little bit of a meal' in each of those restaurants :-) What we all tend to do is eat at a broad cross-section within the norms of natural eating times and visit the other restaurants and talk to the owner or even the diners if it can be done discretely. In the same vein we don't sleep at every hotel!"
Talk to the owners for your evaluation! Says it all.
Rating: 2
Summary: Lonely Liar
Comment: The Lonely Planet came with me for a 6-week stay in the Corinthia. Overall I found prices to be very outdated. When I turned to the book looking for specific information, most of the time I discovered it was either scant or missing.
In Athens, I stayed in a couple of budget accomodations in Plaka that received glowing reviews from the guide -- both places didn't even come close to the authors' high praise. In Delphi, the phone number provided for the hotel where I wanted to stay actually rang at a completely unrelated pension several blocks away. A description of which bus to take into Athens from Bus Terminal A and B would have been incredibly useful, and saved me an afternoon of wandering.
I also referred to this book many times for information about the towns and sites around Ancient Corinth, only to find it totally useless. Clearly the authors' own distate about places accounts for this gap. For example: "Loutraki: The town was devastated by the 1981 earthquake, and subsequent reconstruction has resulted in its reincarnation as a tacky resort with dozens of modern, characterless hotels along the seafront. Loutraki hardly warrants an overnight stay." That's it.
Color-photo sections are a nice selling feature of the book, but don't help much when you're trying to find your way around Greece. When I referred to this book I often ended up more lost than found. Browsing through some of the comparable guides, such as the Rough Guide or Let's Go, I unfortunately found them to have very similar shortcomings. Lonely Planet forced me to approach more Greeks and ask directions, and to learn how to find my way around on my own -- perhaps something I can thank them for after all. Next time I go to Greece, I'll leave the guidebook at home.
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Title: Lonely Planet Greek Islands (Greek Islands, 2002) by David Willett, Carolyn Bain, Brigitte Barta, Kate Daly, Rosemary Hall, Paul Hellander ISBN: 1740590503 Publisher: Lonely Planet Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.99 |
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Title: Lonely Planet Greek Phrasebook: With Two-Way Dictionary (Phrasebooks) by Markella A. Callimassia, Markella Mikkelsen ISBN: 0864426836 Publisher: Lonely Planet Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Lonely Planet Athens: City Map (City Maps) by Lonely Planet Publications ISBN: 1740593200 Publisher: Lonely Planet Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Lonely Planet Turkey (Turkey, 8th Ed) by Pat Yale, Verity Campbell, Richard Plunkett ISBN: 1740593626 Publisher: Lonely Planet Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.99 |
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Title: Lonely Planet Athens (Athens, 1st Ed) by David Willett, Kim Wildman ISBN: 1864502959 Publisher: Lonely Planet Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.99 |
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