Lonely Planet Southwest USA

Every time I've used a Lonely Planet guide book I've always been entertained by the fun and educational writing, spot-on and occasionally quirky pictures, and accurate, up-to-date descriptions. This Southwest USA guide is no exception. I like to use this one to plan long-distance road trips - I can get an overall picture of not-to-miss highlights here; if I need more details, I can go to other sources of course. I think the best use of this book is to give the reader a great starting point for any southwest travels. I'm pretty sure Lonely Planet has several other guides to specific destinations - those guides have more details, say for example Las Vegas - one critic here says there's not enough about LV - they clearly haven't seen the great LV guides available from Lonely Planet - they're the places to look for insider's tips and extra details. This book is an excellent regional guide.

I feel this book has been very helpful in planning my forthcoming trip to the area. However, compared to other lonely planet volumes, I feel the details concerning points of interest, lodging and dining are a little skimpy.

I recently made a road trip across the American Southwest and purchased both the Lonely Planet 4th Edition (December 2005) and the Rough Guide 4th Edition (October 2006) as my guides for the week-long adventure. Lonely Planet emerges as the clear winner when the two are compared side by side. It is less than half the thickness of the Rough Guide book, yet has more coverage per town or natural site. I commend Lonely Planet for using such a thin but readable font and thin, high-quality paper to make this guidebook have such a small footprint. The Lonely Planet guide is divided into tabbed chapters by state (the guide covers Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Las Vegas, and Southwestern Colorado). Maps cover both regions and downtown areas of the major cities and towns in the Southwest. For each city, restaurants, hotels, attractions, and essentials like internet access, post offices, bookstores, and medical facilities are listed. The sidebars contain information from a historical or side note perspective--these are perfect for reading aloud during the inevitable driving time for any Southwest adventure. If you are planning to spend a long time in the Grand Canyon or other attraction area, I recommend purchasing an additional supplemental guidebook. As a road warrior, I appreciated that this book has all the essentials, but leaves week-long trips to Las Vegas or the Grand Canyon to other guidebooks.

This guide has tons of info for food, lodging, shopping, services, attractions, and activities. Margin "tabs" make it easy to thumb to a specific area. My only complaint is the greyscale maps are unreadable because of tiny fonts and low contrast.There is bleed thru from backside of pages also causing contrast problems and readability. Overall though, it is a good, packable guidebook.

I compared this guide with Mobile's and Frommer's when I visited a book store and I ended up buying this one even though it was the most expensive. It appeared to me that it contained more useful and condensed info compared to the Mobile guide. That one used big fonts and a lot of gaps in the text so it filled up pages with not much. The Frommer's one was more bulky and felt that I couldn't spot some useful info quickly. It's interesting to notice that the previous version of lonely platet's southwest had very good ratings compared to this one. I haven't seen that edition. I hope this new one maintained some of its quality.