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Rating: 
Summary: Never lonely with LP
Review: As usual, Lonely Planet ("LP") provides a practical guide for travel in Greece. A great guide for students, adults and even professionals on vacation, who enjoy soaking up the Greek culture.
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Summary: 3 Weeks in Greece with Lonely Planet
Review: 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.
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Summary: very helpful maps for the driver
Review: On a 10-day rental car trip around the mainland in a rental car this guide was very useful because of all the city maps, much more so than the D-K guide, the Frommer's, or even a Michelin Neos guide. The restaurant recommendations were good as well. As for hotels... well, the Lonely Planet authors don't seem to have American standards when it comes to comfort. For smaller towns generally the Lonely Planet was the only book that had any information at all.
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Summary: Lonely Planet Island-Hops in Greece
Review: The Acropolis, Olympia, Delphi - these are just some of the well-known images of ancient Greece. Lonely Planet's newly revised "Greece" travel guide points you to all the major sites, but also shows you the way to the hidden coves, postcard-perfect beaches, mountain olive groves and peaceful medieval villages of this beautiful Mediterranean getaway. With practical travel information both on and off the beaten-path, you'll discover a land of timeless pleasures and learn of its history and people.Nuts & Bolts • more than 130 easy-to-read maps • up-to-date information on inter-island ferries, including a ferry map • hundreds of places to stay, eat and be entertained, whatever your budget • comprehensive sections on history, culture and mythology • Greek language guide and place names in Greek script • advice on where to party and where to enjoy island solitude
Rating: 
Summary: Lonely Liar
Review: 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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Summary: A Thorough Account of Greece for the Hard-Core Traveller
Review: 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:
Summary: A Thorough Account of Greece for the Hard-Core Traveller
Review: 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:
Summary: A Thorough Account of Greece for the Hard-Core Traveller
Review: 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:
Summary: Just OK.
Review: 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.
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