The Rough Guides' St. Lucia Directions

Although still a bit pricey, this guide book seems to be one of the best available specifically for St. Lucia. It's organized geographically with helpful information about accessibility from one section of the island to another. It has a good listing of restaurants, accommodations, places to see, and activities available. I would recommend it highly for anyone planning a week's vacation or honeymoon there.

We just returned from our trip to St Lucia, and this guidebook was invaluable as we planned our vacation and explored the island. It has great reviews of most, but not all, restaurants, lodging, and activities. It has beautiful color and black-and-white pictures throughout, and it's compact size makes it great for taking along with you. It's hard to find much travel information about St. Lucia on the Internet (besides the major resorts), so this guidebook was great. The one problem is the prices it lists for things are either out-of-date, or they got their EC (Eastern Caribbean, the local currency) prices mixed up with their US prices. For example, entrance to the Diamond Botanical gardens was listed as 7 EC, and it was 12.50 EC. Dinner at the Treehouse restaurant at Anse Chastenet resort was listed as 40-80 EC, and it was more like 120-220 EC. Dinner at Mango Tree restaurant was listed as 30-40 EC, and it was more like 65-130 EC.

This was a wonderful guide book to have before and during our recent trip to St. Lucia. It one of a series of guide books. I'd recommend it or any of the other Rough Guide publications based on my experience with this one. We were inspired to take a lot of hikes and go to good snorkeling places we probably would not have found on our own on our 5 day visit to St. Lucia.

I purchased this book simply because I needed to purchase one more item to qualify for free shipping. My husband and I are leaving for St. Lucia in a few days and have found this little book to be of great help. I love the maps that are attached to the inside cover (very convient). I also loved reading the restaurant and hotel reviews. I didn't have any expectations for this book being anything more than a quick read while on the plane, but I was pleasantly suprised. I couldn't help but dive right into the book when it arrived. It has a decent amount of colored pictures and lots of information. Definitly worth the few dollars :)

Although we won't be leaving for our first trip to St. Lucia for another week, I have to say that this guidebook had everything I look for when researching vacation destinations. Given that St. Lucia is a small island, there aren't the number of guidebooks out there that there are for larger destinations. I ordered three different books on St. Lucia but this is, by far, my favorite. My frustration with other guides is that some didn't even have color pictures! When I'm planning a vacation, I like to have clear, color pictures of different attractions and this book has quite a few. It's also more detailed than my other books as far as describing restaurants, resorts, and directions to attractions. I also love the pocket size of this guide so that I can take it along and utilize the maps, directions, reviews etc. without having something large and bulky to tote around. I feel this guidebook was the most informative and had the clear advantage of having more pictures.