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Lonely Planet

zagfan1 said:
I was going to sit back and just read as much as I could within these forums on the traveling industry, but when I came across this particular thread I felt compelled to share with you guys the site I work for. Zoomandgo.com is essentially a lonely planet 2.0 for travelers of all walks of life. There is a wealth of content on there that can help you guys plan for your next trip.

Mods if this is viewed as spam then delete it as necessary. My intentions were not to pimp the zoomandgo site, but rather help those looking for a better alternative than Lonely Planet.

Cheers!
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It sure looks like spam. Prove me wrong by sticking around and joining in with the boards.
 
that fucking website has just crashed my firefox, screwing up three downloads that were nearly complete. cnut!
 
Crispy I fully intend on posting a lot around here and gabi I'm sorry that the site crashed your downloads. I've spent the last year traveling and I've been Internet junkie for as long as I can remember.
 
Sorry, cant see how you cant say that's not spam given that your very 1st post breaks the faq, which says no ad for anything about 3 times.
 
Rough Guides are worse than LPs guides - good on general feel of a place, but dreadful when it comes to details. My bone with the LPs is that they've changed the way the maps are done in the past four years or so. They look a little nicer but they're much more vague now, whereas before they were functional and useful.
 
zagfan1 said:
My intentions were not to pimp the zoomandgo site
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That's nice to hear. Could you please take the web address out of your tagline? It sure does look like persistent (self) promotion.
 
Arghh, bloody LP. When they aren't spreading unnecessary fear about traveling by telling horror stories about things that have happened to like, one person twelve years ago, then they're just useless.

The India LP and hasn't pissed me off quite as much as the Korean LP but it's getting close. What is the point in giving the names of hotels in English when they're written in the native script? You could spend the rest of your life looking.

Some of the things the LP has told me have been utter bullshit. The Indian one mentions a cafe full of travelers, lots of games and great music, I went there and it was empty and was nothing like described. Are they just taking back handers?

And indeed, the Rough Guide is far more realistic and much less hysterical.
 
Yu_Gi_Oh said:
Arghh, bloody LP. When they aren't spreading unnecessary fear about traveling by telling horror stories about things that have happened to like, one person twelve years ago, then they're just useless.

The India LP and hasn't pissed me off quite as much as the Korean LP but it's getting close. What is the point in giving the names of hotels in English when they're written in the native script? You could spend the rest of your life looking.

Some of the things the LP has told me have been utter bullshit. The Indian one mentions a cafe full of travelers, lots of games and great music, I went there and it was empty and was nothing like described. Are they just taking back handers?

And indeed, the Rough Guide is far more realistic and much less hysterical.
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I know what you mean about spreading horror stories.

What pissed me off about the Indian LP was that it was really bad on cheap hotels - exactly the thing LP is meant to be good at. In some cities we went to the cheapest hotels listed and were met at the door by doormen who wanted to carry out bags. That's when you know that you are not in the cheapest hotel in town - not by a long way. Meanwhile there were lots listed at $50 a night and more.

To be fair though, things change very quickly and you can't expect to turn up at a cafe two years after the LP writer reviewed it and expect it to be unchanged. That's just one of the risks of guidebooks.
 
True, but the Indian LP I have is the 2007 edition, I would have expected it to be more accurate then it is. Don't they phone up the places they're reviewing and do a final fact check before it goes to print?

I agree with you about the hotel listings. :) I'm considering swapping it for the Rough Guide...
 
Have to say I prefered the Rough Guide to LP when in Australia. Neither was perfect but while the Rough Guide introduces things rather irreverently, LP seems a bit staid. Also Rough Guides come across as "here's a few ideas you could explore if you're in this part of the world" wheras LP comes across as "To get the essential experience you must visit X, eat at Y and sleep at Z. Only then will you really know the place". I started to become cynical and irritated by the whole idea of selling people an "experience". This approach IMO is for people who go somewhere to "do" the place.

I don't like the elitist traveller view that regards the majority of travellers with scorn because they follow a supposed mainstream when travelling but neither do I like those who try to buy an experience and lack any independent imagination. Got to have a happy medium between the two I think.

Curiously everyone bar one other person I met carried the LP like a Bible.

Rough Guide plus is the contexts section which is much more in-depth (esp. on books to read). Again though, it's just ideas, I followed some of its advice and ignored other parts.
 
Yu Gi, I bet if you investigated to the time between the actual research and when the book reaches the shelves there would still be a significant gap - most of the research for a 2007 book will have been done in 2006 at the latest and possibly before then. As for a final check on everything before going to print - not very practical I think - (a) because it would be an enormous amount of work that would probably end up delaying publication and (b) because what are the hotel owners going to say? 'sorry, we turned shit since you last visited us'. Like I say, I think you just have to accept that things will change and printed guidebooks can't keep up. Although LP are annoying, I don't think it's fair to blame them for a problem that every guidebook has.
 
Fledgling said:
LP comes across as "To get the essential experience you must visit X, eat at Y and sleep at Z. Only then will you really know the place".
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This is definitely the worst flaw of Lonely Planets. It is absolutely inexcusable.

Of course, you're not obliged to believe their every word. I've sometimes deliberately gone to towns that the LP has described as uninteresting and avoided sites that the LP told me were mandatory. You can blame the LP for being dictatorial, but you have to blame the people who read them for being sheep :p
 
Yup, I learned that over time. At first I was silly and wanted to have the "best experience of my life ever ever ever" and thought there was some easy way of doing that. Thankfully I stopped doing that and things became more interesting.


(Course people are free to do what they want, I just thought LP was talking about one size fits all travel and I personally tired of it).
 
Yu_Gi_Oh said:
If just ONE of the bloody telephone numbers for hotels in Bundi worked then I might be happy.

Arrrrggggg!
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Perhaps they're trying to encourage you to give up on booking ahead and just go with the flow man :cool: :p
 
editor said:
The Lonely Planet boards have perhaps the most exploitative terms I've ever seen:
http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=6640213
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I've commented there, but I'll add here: rip-offs in publishing are rife. Any freelance will tell you this (I imagine laptop, for instance, could go on about this all week without repeating himself). There's a lot of "work experience" about and there's also a lot of people who genuinely don't understand why it isn't OK for them to pay you when they feel like it.
 
Incidentally, it has more than once occurred to me that I could vastly improve the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet entries for where I now live: I know what's changed, where the maps are wrong and what's been inadvertently missed out.

I don't, because I don't think I'll be paid for it.
 
I've just been reading the LP wikipedia entry:
"Lonely Planet's initial strength has caused some problems. In certain contexts many people equate Lonely Planet with backpackers. The 30th anniversary relaunch of its various series was intended to make clearer the split between the backpacker-only products and those (now the majority) aimed at more affluent travellers and tourists."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_Planet

I hadn't realised they had explicitly broken from providing guidebooks for backpackers. Explains a lot.
 
What I notice here in Mexico is that hotels, bars etc., heavily pushed by the lonely planet push their prices up to suit their new clientele. Other bars hotels etc of a similar class tend be cheaper, better value, more welcoming (...and less full of LP clutching folk).

Problem is without the LP listing how do you find em with limited time and maybe limted language skills? (its great for those of us lucky enough to live in a place...but when yer on holiday?)

Especially as the LP likes to push the idea of NOT just turning up in a place and seeing what's available...
 
bumping this thread rather than doing a new one. I have been buying LP for years and only other guide book I have used is Rough Guide to Thailand. Today I broke with tradition and bought a Footprint guide to India. Im going to read it at work later tonight. I was nervous buying it as I am so familiar with LP but as with others I have become less of a fan of LP. Perhaps that is as has been mentioned their shift toward more toward a middle class budget to travel.

I fell in love with travelling from watching the Lonely Planet programme that used to be shown in the early 90s on Ch4 on a Sunday and even have Lonely Planet music CDs.

Guide books make me excited...:)
 
Yeah, I always buy the LP guidebooks because I am used to the formula. I would feel lost if I used another guidebook. What I like about the LP books are the detailed directions they give you to get from one place to another. But I have noticed that the books contents are shrinking and that budget accomodation has less choice.
 
gnoriac said:
Burma Campaign's Boycott Lonely Planet e-mail form.
lonely_planet.jpg

says it all.
Click to expand...

yes.
 
Lea said:
Yeah, I always buy the LP guidebooks because I am used to the formula. I would feel lost if I used another guidebook. What I like about the LP books are the detailed directions they give you to get from one place to another. But I have noticed that the books contents are shrinking and that budget accomodation has less choice.
Click to expand...

Stop.

Buy these guides every single time.

http://www.footprintbooks.com/

Simply because they are great.
 
moonsi til said:
bumping this thread rather than doing a new one. I have been buying LP for years and only other guide book I have used is Rough Guide to Thailand. Today I broke with tradition and bought a Footprint guide to India. Im going to read it at work later tonight. I was nervous buying it as I am so familiar with LP but as with others I have become less of a fan of LP. Perhaps that is as has been mentioned their shift toward more toward a middle class budget to travel.

I fell in love with travelling from watching the Lonely Planet programme that used to be shown in the early 90s on Ch4 on a Sunday and even have Lonely Planet music CDs.

Guide books make me excited...:)
Click to expand...


I'm gutted I'm not getting along with my Footprint book at all. The text is too small and I don't like the codes for the accomodation and there are not many photographs.

I'm considering buying a LP but my friend who I'm travelling with bought one (but I want my own...:rolleyes:)...moo moo
 
Lea said:
Yeah, I always buy the LP guidebooks because I am used to the formula. I would feel lost if I used another guidebook. What I like about the LP books are the detailed directions they give you to get from one place to another. But I have noticed that the books contents are shrinking and that budget accomodation has less choice.
Click to expand...
I've even noticed that the detailed directions - which I used to appreciate as well - are shrinking quite considerably. Which means the LP books have taken a major step towards Useless Suckdom.

I read 'Do travel writers go to hell' on my last trip, written by an LP writer. It's very entertaining if obviously a bit fictionalised. But he does mention that the LP policy on the budget/mid-range/top-range proportions used to be something like 60/30/10 and now it's 20/60/20 - so a pretty big shift.
 
golightly said:
It's a bit shit isn't it. I've been using their Sydney and their Vanuatu guides and the descriptions are often inaccurate and they miss out on a lot of vital information for travellers. For instance, some of the itineries they suggest for Vanuatu are completely unworkable unless you are very lucky, and the descriptions for Sydney bars bear very little relation to the reality. As far as I can tell the writers are more concerned about saying how cool they are to have visited such places than providing useful facts for other travellers.
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Yeah.

When reading them it always reminds me of that episode of Ab Fab where they meet that travel writer who is a complete idiot.
 
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