Rating: 
Summary: Tops!
Review: This book was my "Bible" for backpacking through Europe in '99 & '00. After having never stepped foot out of the US, i ventured to Europe alone w/ nothing but a backpack, some phone numbers & this book. I did not have the problems of out of date info as some have mentioned. In fact i came across some of the best & cheapest hotels i've ever been to, found very good inexpensive eats & learned how to read a map thanks to this book. Each chapter gives you some historical info on every country, city & town & even tells you what dangers to look out for, do's & dont's, train info & where to go if you need help. After 3 months crisscrossing 12 different European countries, my Lonely Planet Book was dog-eared, torn & severely worn-out...I highly recommend this book for long term travel on a buget.
Rating: 
Summary: Good overview of Europe
Review: This deadweight trunk of uselessness is better a door stop than a guide. Dont be fooled. Buy each country if you are going to use Lonely Planet. It is not so much the size of the book, but the useless info they include. It did make me think about going to Morocco, though. Still wondering why they would include it in a European guide.
Rating: 
Summary: Lame and worthless
Review: This deadweight trunk of uselessness is better a door stop than a guide. Dont be fooled. Buy each country if you are going to use Lonely Planet. It is not so much the size of the book, but the useless info they include. It did make me think about going to Morocco, though. Still wondering why they would include it in a European guide.
Rating:
Summary: Let's Go is a better way to go
Review: This is a truly embarassing book. I believe my copy included the year 2001 in the title (I binned it some time ago), but most sections of the book were at least 4 years out of date. Let's Go tells us that it is completely revised and updated every year, so I expected the same from Lonely Planet - why else would they put the year on the cover? It didn't take long to discover that my assumption was ill-founded. There are places in Spain where over 50% of the accomadations listed are no longer in operation. Imagine walking up to the address they give and finding a condemned building, finding an empty lot, or finding a shop that has been there for a few years. Now imagine this happening to you 5 times in a row before you find a place. Imagine yourself arriving in Bratislava and hitting up the tourist office for directions to the YMCA hostel. Smile when the agent there laughs and says they tore that place down 3 years ago, but that she always has people asking for directions there (hmmm... I wonder why that could be?). Imagine looking up a copy of Let's Go and seeing that they no longer list the YMCA in Bratislava as a place for accomadation. Imagine reading a glowing review about a cathedral, only to go to that cathedral and find out that the blurb on the back of the admittance ticket is an almost word-for-word copy of the text in Lonely Planet (or is it the other way around?). Imagine how helpful it is to read a book where most of the authors (especially the one who covered Spain) are unable to say a bad thing about anywhere. Arrive in a town that reads better than it looks, and imagine you are somewhere else. Those are some of the bigger problems with this book. For the most part, it is just really out of date and it shows. The prices in Let's go are more accurate, but even they will always be a little off because of inflation. Some of the prices in Lonely Planet were off by an astounding 250% (yes, 250%), however, which is due to the fact that it has been a number of years since that section was updated. Given that this book is not updated very regularly, and that Lonely planet must make a killing off of these books, there are also a lot of errors that have remained in successive printings and which I find unacceptable. For example, in the 4 or so pages they devote to Trujillo, Merida, and Cacares (3 towns in Spain), they quote 3 different prices for transportation between these towns. Or take a look at their "top 10/bottom 10" list in the introduction: they seem unsure just where St. Petersberg is, as they list it as being in both Scandanavia and in Eastern Europe. That is just sloppy, but I think it reflects how much care has been put into the book. What really annoys me is that Lonely Planet seems to rely on its readers to be its fact-checkers, its contributors, and its editors. If you do send in a correction, you have a chance to win a free copy of their over-priced book, a good percentage of which was written by peaople like you. Yippee! Sometimes I think that some of the non-existent accomadation information I encountered was sent in disgruntled readers as a form of retribution (Lonely Planet admits on their website that they haven't stayed at all the places they 'recommend'). Sometimes I think of doing the same. I personally get the impression that their reviewers have stayed at something less than 50% of the places. I also suspect that they haven't even visited many of the sights they recommend (at some hostels the staff will make jokes about this). As I mentioned earlier, some of the reviews seem to have been taken directly from promotional material. And if you have any knowledge of the sights reviewed, you will often find the reviews to be incorrect or misleading. I was also interested to note that, on their website, Lonely Planet informs us that their reviewers (those that they actually do hire) are free to tell various hotels, hostels, pensions, restaurants, etc., that they are working for Lonely Planet and will be reviewing their establishments. Perhaps that explains why many of these places allegedly feature friendly staff, free internet, free maps, free coffee, clean rooms, winter heating, etc., but the bonuses never quite materialize when you stay there. For what it's worth, I spent 9 months traveling around with this book, and that may have contributed to my disapointment. If you aren't going to spend so much time on your vacation you probably won't go the smaller places where a guidebook is more important, and its mistakes more evident.
Rating:
Summary: Good book, but a little bit is missing.
Review: When my friend and I travelled Europe last April we used this book and the Let's Go book. Lonely Planet was helpful, but we mostly relied on the Let's Go as it had more in-depth information and usually more listing for hostels and restaurants. This books isn't bad and one can easily rely on it to go through Europe, but I'd recommend the Let's Go. However, Lonely Planet does have better maps, although it has left has not included subway maps, which would be helpful.
Rating:
Summary: Too much, too little, too late...
Review: With 17 countries on a 102-day itinerary and a careful eye on our budget, my son and I needed a book like this for our recently completed trip. Although we stuck with it until the end, I gotta say, Lonely Planet's "Europe on a Shoestring" has lots of flaws and you should think carefully before buying it.
THE GOOD NEWS: This is a great alternative to buying a dozen country-specific books. You'll save on pack weight and on dollars (or Euros). Furthermore, since its from Lonely Planet, this book does a lot better job than most of the "mainstream tourist" books of recognizing that a $300-a-night hotel room and a $50 meal are NOT in your plans.
THE BAD NEWS: (a) The prices and lots of info are out of date and getting more so. (b) The maps will taunt you with enough information to get you going but not enough to keep from getting lost, and (c) Overall the book offers a weird combination of too-much and too-little information.
You should consider this book only if you are planning to visit at least 10 different countries in Europe - otherwise you are better off buying individual country guides while in Europe (or sneaking a peek at the freebies stashed at many Hostel reception desks.)
My rating is three stars because you have to realize that there is probably no book out there that does an adequate job of `covering' all of Europe - but there are still lots of travelers, like us, who hope to do just that!
* * * details follow
(A) Check the COPYRIGHT date of the book very carefully before you buy! The one currently for sale is copyright early 2003. This sounded pretty current to us but it apparently means LP wrapped up whatever research they did into updating prices and other information sometime in 2001 or '02; for a trip in 2004 this was WAY OUT OF DATE. For one in 2005 it will be worse. It just gets to be a drag `translating' the prices: every 15 Euro Hostel is really going to be "18 to 20". Every 7 Euro admission fee: "9 or 10". Even expecting this problem, it leaves you feeling like your "shoestring" is getting shredded even more than it already is!
And, of course, prices aren't the only thing that can change in 2 or 3 years! We ran into museums and sights that had been closed for months and even the very strange situation of the LP book saying a museum was going to be closed "until 2004" and then not offering any info about it... as we walked by its open doors! We also bumped up against some hostels and places to stay that were either listed but long-gone or unlisted but two-years-"new."
Consider waiting for a new edition.
(B) The MAPS are a very strange problem. LP has made a clear effort to give you map info for the major cities in most countries and that shows that they realize you will probably be spending most of your time "pounding the pavement." But you won't really need their maps for getting around and touring a city - most major cities have much better maps available for free or cheap and you can usually rustle them up at the train station or hostel.
The REAL REASON you will need the sort of map this book provides is for the tricky first hour in a new city. You've just gotten off yet another train in yet another city and face another new language that's burbling all around you and your first goal is to get to your hostel or hotel and drop your pack.
But the LP city maps are the worst possible compromise of providing not enough info to serve as touring maps but also not enough to get you from that first important point-A to point-B! They trim back on space and printing by only naming SOME of the streets. You'd be surprised how many different ways there are to walk out of a typical European train station! We were unhappily surprised how many times we did that and found ourselves on a street whose name did not grace the LP map.
OF COURSE ASKING strangers is a great part of the travel experience and most of the time it was fun to figure out the best sequence of gestures and pidgin English and pseudo-Eurish to ask someone where the heck we were! But you'll do plenty of that anyways and besides, if, like Blanche DuBois, you've "always relied upon the kindness of strangers", why bring a guidebook at all?
(C) Its hard to whack LP for trying TOO hard; but when you are ending a 20 mile hike knowing that the 4-pound guidebook in your pack has at least 2-pounds of info about countries you aren't ever going to visit, it tends to ring in your mind with every step! This book was TOO extensive for us and I can't imagine anyone with an itinerary that would include even 75% of the countries listed. Do you want to lug around all that info on Lithuania and Latvia and Slovakia and Slovenia ? Our answer was to take a good sharp knife to the pages and hack out about 600 pages of excess. If you're a bibliophile and that prospect makes you shudder, at least think carefully about their "Western Europe" or "Eastern..." books instead.
At the same time, we often felt that the book offered too little information. For most of the larger countries, the book feels incomplete once you venture out of THE MAJOR CITY. I realize that this is the "we can't include everything" problem again, but its no help to understand their editorial challenges when you are lost in Lubeck or trying to find out about a place that's listed in your hostels book but not LP.
(D) Minor but annoying complaints include (1) less focus on hostels than I expected, (2) limited info on money-saving "self-catering" (e.g. where to buy food to COOK) and (3) too much silly self-promotion (it became a joke with us to read the section for each country where they `recommend' other books about the country and somehow only ever recommend other LP guides!
(E) Minor but gratifying kudos for their (1) thoughtful and informative country histories, (2) limited but necessary language guides (you can go far indeed if you just memorize the words for "thank you" in most places)
I guess the fact is that traveling as we did, lots of countries, lots of cities and lots of short stays, isn't a reasonable way to see Europe. OF COURSE its better to spend two weeks in Berlin - and get a "Berlin Book" - or a month zigzagging through France - and buy a "France book." But unless you've got unlimited time (and unlimited money) you'll probably face the same dilemma that drove us to our wacky itinerary and this ultimately unsatisfactory book: how can you sit there and plan to just "skip Italy" or "pass up Vienna"? Like us, like this book, you will probably end up trying too hard to do everything.
Enjoy your trip.
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