Lonely Planet Greece

I really like the Lonely Planet travel guides. They really try to cover all the basics and then give you tips for off the beaten track. This edition is a 2006 so prices are not even close, but I still got websites to check out current prices. I wanted an overview of Greece so I could start planning where I wanted to go and this guide certainly does that. It also has lots of maps for each region. I highly recommend this Lonely Planet Guide to Greece.

My husband and I have been to Greece 3 times using our 4th edition LP Greece. The maps are excellent; we've gotten exactly where we need to go. We read about the different islands, appear at the port w/our luggage, and take whatever boat is going next to a particular group, i.e. Cyclades, and read about the various other stops on the way. The book is not designed to be a travel agent by doing all the work for you. It is a guidebook, and some specific info should be found elsewhere (such as the internet) in trip planning. We use the internet sites listed in LP, esp. the hotel sites, so we have an idea of the author's grading scale. We found plenty of great suggestions regarding places to stay and eat, and if other reviewers felt that info was lacking, the LP would have to be 6 inches thick! While some towns have a 100 places to stay, it is not necessary to list every place in LP. We use the LP reviews as a guideline; we compare the author's opinion by what we actually found. After all, one person's dungeon is another's castle ( & vice versa). The hints, tips, & warnings (esp. about taxis!) were a great help. We're buying the newest editon for our 4th trip as our poor old book is so worn and unreadable.

I spend a month every summer in Greece, and this guide is excellent! It is concise, reads very easily, and gives good common-sense recommendations on what to see and where to stay. It is as up-to-date as you can reasonably expect with changing prices and euro/dollar fluctuations. A very, very practical guide from the budget tourist to middle class. Excellent pictures, very good maps, a fine job! It reminds me, in a way, of the Michelin guides to Europe. Reviewed by David Lundberg, author of Olympic Wandering: Time Travel Through Greece

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.

Greece was my first time travelling alone and this book was recommended by my friend from Greece. I brought other books but I never needed them. This book is laid out in an easy to read style and one can find information very quickly. When I was in Greece, everybody who did not have a Lonely Planet book was asking to borrow mine. Another nice thing about the book is the size, it seems as if the authors designed it to be carried around. It is not heavy, even at 700+ pages. I carried it everywhere. The accomodation recomendations were accurate and excellent choices. The locations of some of them could not have been better.