Rating: 
Summary: Waste of $$
Review: At least for Armenia, I found the book to be a very poor guide. I have been travelling/living/camping all over Armenia for the past year and a half and was quite happy to hear the LP was out. When I finally got my hands on it in a bookstore I went through the entire Armenia/Karabakh section and was incredibly disappointed and refused to buy it.My website has a better guidebook to Armenia which can be downloaded for free... written by a fellow at the US Embassy who just enjoyed travelling around Armenia a great deal. It is over 100 pages and has better topographical maps than you can find anywhere else. It is in the tourism section of...and is called the "Rediscover Armenia Guidebook". Anyways, if you did buy it, maybe the disproportionately large Georgia section is more useful? I have not been there yet, but I don't plan on using the Lonely Planet book when I do go.
Rating: 
Summary: to Mr. Meneshian
Review: Dear Mr. Meneshian
Be careful when writing reviews. Unfortunately, you are ignorant about the fact that there is no Armenian Region of Nagorno Karabakh. For more information look at the official maps. You probably have no idea about other conventional maps, but the map of the "Great Armenia" on your wall.
Thank you
Rating: 
Summary: To Kakha Khizanishvili
Review: First, "unexistent" is not a word. Additionally, I am flattered that you would consider reading Armenian and Georgian history--and of course you did not. Neither did you read your own history. If you did, you would discover that every inch of your land was once other nation's empires; as a result, all art and architecture that is claimed to be "Turkish" is, in fact, either Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, and/or Arabic.
Rating:
Summary: Useful, but far below the Lonely Planet standard
Review: I have always been a great admirer and user of Lonely Planet guidebooks, but this time they really produced a rather poor work. On one side I can't blame them, as the region is hard to get to know, and this probably remains the best guidebook about it anyway. On the other hand, lots of data are simply wrong, for which I can see no reasonable excuse. For example, the guidebook says that there are daily flights betwen Tbilisi and Yerevan, while there have been no scheduled flights since the collapse of the USSR in 1989 ! And contrary to what is written, KLM, Northwest or Alitalia have never flown to Yerevan. The guidebook says that there are buses from Armenia to Turkey, and on the very same page it also says that it is impossible to get from Armenia to Turkey except via Georgia... Overall, there is very little this guidebook can tell you on how to get around within the region. The guidebook gives plenty of information on hotels in Tbilisi which are supposedly good, while they are now filled by refugees (surely an interesting and touching thing to see, but not where you might wish to stay). The major internet café they recommend in Tbilisi does not exist. Many addresses are simply wrong (either old or non-existent). The book makes a lot of fuss about the corruption and unclear regulations of Armenian and other border officials, which is not the case (for example in Armenia you CAN get a visa at any border for 25 $ which is valid for 3 days, and when you leave you pay 3 $ for each day you oversayed your visa) - no corruption, no problems. The book gives lots of concerns about safety and other issues which are unnecessary, and especially in its Armenia section it seems to be biasedly 'anti-local' (something one would never expect from a guidebook). Overall, it seems poorly researched and not always well written. The chapter on Nagorno-Karabakh is ridiculously short (4 pages), not to mention the one on Abkhazia (less than two pages !). Nevertheless, some information is indeed useful and sometimes even correct, and you are better off taking this guide with you to the region, rather than being without it. Just take its advice with a lot of caution, and don't take any of its data for granted.
Rating:
Summary: Not this one!
Review: I normally like LP books. But for this region you should instead buy the Bradt Guide (for Georgia) or the one from Trailblazer (for Azerbaijan & Georgia). The reasons are clear from all the other reviews here!
Rating:
Summary: Last Lonely Planet publication I have bought
Review: I purchase travel guides for work and have been regular buyer of Lonely Planet publications and Discovery channel's Insight Guides for virtually all Western European countries. Recent addition to the area of responsibility forced me to start looking for a guide for Azerbaijan and this was one of the items I tested.
As I am quite knowledgeable about this region, having read this guide I was seriously concerned about the inaccuracies in wording, translations, geographic references. Like that sloppiness was not bad enough, the authors go on to "sneak in" some political statements by putting Nagorno Karabakh under Armenia (I assume LP would not be a part of this, had they know). While this is a disputed region, neither party to the conflict believes it is apart of Armenia, so the authors are taking a bit of a political license, by doing what would be similar to listing Taiwan under United States.
This is an eye-opener. Travel guides, by their nature, require that the reader had faith in the publisher's reputation. With this book I have a benefit of an insider knowledge...and if this is the standard, then I have permanently lost all faith...LP failed miserably... my rating is Zero. You are better off picking up a local tourist board publication at the Baku International, at least it will tell you of all the cheap hotels that have mushroomed over the last few years.
Rating:
Summary: A handy guide--wish it was updated!
Review: I really enjoyed this book. I bought it for the section on Armenia, but found the Azerbaijan and Georgia sections equally captivating. It has some useful suggestions for tourists, even including Internet cafes! I was pretty surprised it got that detailed. Apparantly though, they're not that updated, so make sure to check beforehand. I'd love to find another book on each individual country, but this is the only one I've come across. Of course it's a bit slim, but that's because it tries to cover so much. It would be better to cover each country more in depth in seperate guides. But that's probably asking for too much! ;) Bravo to Lonely Planet for putting out a guide to the South Caucasus. It's much needed!
Rating:
Summary: buy it only for the maps
Review: I selected this book over the Elliott (AZ with Georgia) because of the superior map quality in the LP book -- a huge mistake in retrospect. The information on sights, culture, history -- all of which are so fascinating and rich for this region -- is so vapid and thin that it is hardly worth lugging around. I'd suggest anyone coming to Az (or elsewhere in the region) buy the Elliott book and augment it with photocopies of the LP maps.
Rating:
Summary: Clumsy and thrown together
Review: I tend to be a fairly big fan of Lonely Planet's style of travel guidebooks - I've used them for travels many times, simply because I like the way they're structured and enjoy all the background information that accompanies their guidebooks. Unfortunately, there are a few duds that slip through the cracks, and this one is unquestionably one of the big ones. Granted, this is a guidebook to one of the most rapidly changing areas of the world when it comes to tourism and travel, but this book doesn't even seem like it was ever in synch with the reality in the South Caucasus. The Azerbaijan section is basically satisfactory, but hardly overwhelming. Sadly, that's the best can be said, as the other two sections are very much lacking. While the Georgia one is sloppy and not at all geared towards what a traveler really needs or wants, the Armenian section is downright awful, with a glaring lack of practical information and even basic facts. Maps go from fuzzy and confusing to completely unreliable, and restaurant listings often lack any sort of notion of prices (or are repeatedly geared for people hardly on a shoestring budget). Sometimes author recommendations are even non-existent - like the 'most recommended restaurant' in Batumi, which seems to have been bulldozed. The author for the Georgian section speaks of a gradually developing agro-tourism and homestay industry in the country, but somehow doesn't bother researching it almost at all (although you get plenty of listings for defunct Soviet hotels!). Illogically, sections on towns and other areas never include the names in Armenian and Georgian (apart from a few in an inadequate glossary in the back of the book), leaving you clueless as to what they'd be unless you spent a long time actually learning the national alphabets thoroughly. And, why throw the individual countries' history sections together into one general, regional history, especially given the unique backgrounds of each people? So much more depth could have been added to the book, but one gets the impression that the authors were racing towards a publishing deadline (especially the one for Armenia!). There's supposedly an update in the works, and it is much needed. For now though, check out instead the Trailblazer guide to Azerbaijan (*much* better coverage, even in the small section on Georgia) and the Rediscovering Armenia book, which is available either in country or on the internet - both of these actually do justice to the region.
Rating:
Summary: Frustrating to use
Review: I think Lonely Planet hurt its reputation with this one-- I was hoodwinked into buying it just because of the Lonely Planet name. What a mistake! Facts are wrong. Phone numbers and addresses are wrong. Information is scattered all over. And I discovered a lot of omissions of important sites for Georgia and Armenia. As a result it was very frustrating trying to use it when I was there in April (2002)and I ended up just giving up and leaving it behind in my hotel. A lot of times there's contradictory facts and you just dont know which one is true! Fortunately I had two other books with me about Georgia and Armenia. For travel to Georgia I would instead recommend "Georgia: A Sovereign Country of the Caucasus." I have continued to refer to it even after returning home from my trip and it is in my permanent collection. It's also a very good introduction to Georgia. In Armenia I prefer "Edge of Time: Traveling in Armenia and Karabagh." This book is also worth holding onto even after your trip is over. It's a very good introduction to Armenia and the photographs were very well done. I didn't go to Azerbaijan and Karabagh so I don't know if Lonely Planet did a better job for those locations.
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