Customer Reviews

Europe on a Shoestring: Big Trips on Small Budgets (Lonely Planet)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am planning to go to exploring in Europe this summer, and I wanted a guide to prepare me with some knowledge of the places I would like to visit. This book achieves that to a degree. The beginning of the book has some useful information about Europe in general, but it has a strange attitude that I noticed immediately.

The authors have a bizarre (and sometimes preachy) liberal bias you wouldn't expect in a travel guide. This is evidenced through their attempt to guilt the reader into buying carbon offsets because of their plane flight (intra-European flights aren't considered as a viable travel option in this book... I wish it had more information about this alternate means). Also, the constant condescending opinions towards Europe's religious sites get a bit old. I wouldn't say I found it offensive, but I would prefer a more objective stance in the writing of my next travel book. It's just distracting.

With this said, there is some really cool information about smaller towns and cities in Europe's countries that you may not find in a more traditional tourist guide. They maintain their goal of staying budget-minded throughout. I wish there was more emphasis on country-to-country travel, as that can be one of the most difficult aspects of a trip to plan. It looks I will have to buy another book to supplement this one. I recommend, but not as an all-in-one guide.

I bought this book as a guide for my recent backpacking tour. This book is HUGE! It has useful information on almost every city or town that many backpackers wish to visit. However, the sheer size of it makes it extremely difficult to carry with you. I wound up making copies of the pages that I would need because I couldn't fit the book in my pack. Other than the size I found some suggestions to be less than desirable. In particular a hostel recommended in Brussels ( 2 Go 4) that is "located in the slightly seedy part of town" was the only hostel open when I made my booking. The description of "slightly seedy" is not an understatement; while it was a relatively cheap place to stay I feel that suggestions such as this should be left out. I found cheaper hotels to stay in, which are left out of the recommendations for Sleeping in each of the cities I used this guide for. The suggestions for places to see and where to find bike rentals, etc were useful, but hit and miss as well. For the most part, the recommendations were useful and informative, especially the Eating and Drinking sections. I will be using this book again in the future, but with much more caution - in particular regarding the Sleeping recommendations.

The Kindle version of this book is a bit lazy.

The maps are too low resolution, so are a bit useless. What's worse is on the PC version, you can't zoom in. At least on the iphone version you can zoom in. Of course, all you get is a grainy mess.

The index does not work, the words are not hyper-links to the appropriate part of the book and there are no page numbers you could skip to manually.

I can't comment on how this book works on an actual Kindle device, I don't have one.

On the other hand, the paper version of this book could be used as a building-block, it is so large. I've used the paper version of this book for a couple of years and found it very helpful.

I backpacked through Europe in 2006. I'd bought a Lonely Planet book for Western Europe and loved it so much that I bought this book for this trip.

I could look past the gigantic size, after all it has a lot to cover, but except for a few bars, I didn't find the information particularly helpful. Every chapter recommends visiting a church and while I know Europe is all about the churches, after you've seen one, you've seen the all. Surely each city must have something to see other than a church? All the recommended sites were the tourist traps. The maps were not helpful, either. The only good thing about this book is it listed the tourist office in every place so I knew where it was so I could go get a proper map and helpful information.

I didn't really use this book at all or find it helpful. Walk around, explore, figure it out. You don't need a book.

A great book overall. My only gripe is that the book doesn't offer enough sample itineraries. It offers a few in the beginning of the book that are good, but it would be nice if it offered a nice "tour" of each country in each of the chapters.

Purchased as a gift for a friend who is embarking on first solo OS trip - lots of useful info!

Those Lonely Planet guys really know what they are doing, if you are going on a trip to Europe, this is a MUST!!

Used this to travel across Europe for 9 weeks. It weighs a TON, so my sister and I ripped it in half and each carried part. Then we ripped out the countries as we exited, further lightening our load! I would have hated to carry the whole thing all summer. It was basic and had limited options for each location, but gave us a great place to start, and helped us feel safe, and we used online resources and tips from our hostels to make our visit more meaningful. I will definitely buy another for my next trip.

I have used the Lonely Planet books on specific countries for years and saved a lot of money and seen some off-the-beaten path wonders that they recommended. The "on a shoestring" info in this book consisted of names of a few restaurants and hotels. These were nowhere close to their descriptions in the single country books. I looked for trains to and from cities and one might be listed. I looked at countries that I have visited and outside of the capital and maybe one city in a region, all the places where shoestring travel would be great were missing. I felt like the book was just giving quick country overviews. It would be good as a reference book in a library for deciding what country you want to do further reach on, but I can't recommend it for a person who would use it for travel purposes.

The product was in excellent conditions when I got it! It arrived on time and we had no problems at all with it. Highly recomend this guid, I used it to travel through Europe and it helped me achieve an amazing trip. BEST GUIDE EVER!!