Customer Reviews

India (Lonely Planet Country Guide)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

(This review is for the 2007 edition of this book.)

Let me start by saying it's possible that LP is still the best guidebook to use in India - it's my understanding that the other books have their shortcomings too. That being said...

I hated this travel guide. It weighs a million pounds, but it seems that 30% of its text could have been cut by a judicious editor. There is so much useless smugness, so much filler, and so many tired attempts at humor I was exasperated. I recommend you pick any page at random in the book and see for yourself all the sentences that could be cut out.

Furthermore, in many cities there were longer descriptions of the hotels than the actual sights. I'd really appreciate some information about what I went to India to see, rather than some cute commentary about the decorations in room 201 of whatever hotel. The guide invariably recommended restaurants that "serve all the backpacker favorites!!" - i.e. crappy restaurants for cheap tourists. Why on earth would you go to India--justifiably famous for its food--and eat a bad imitation of European and Israeli food? (And also why would a guidebook devote so much space to restaurants, period, at the expense of historical/cultural info, when no one is going to hunt down the tiny unmarked lanes that fill all Indian cities to find the mediocre LP-recommended place?)

The guide also had a number of errors and omissions - some really embarrassing. In Amritsar I went into a building LP said housed a museum to find bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling and people sleeping on the floor. Pretty sure that hadn't been a museum for years and years! I see in the new edition that this has been corrected.

The book had good basic information about sights but I can't recommend it for much else. Not sure if the other big guides (Rough Guides, Footprint) are any better.

I was going to India on my honeymoon and I bought both the Lonely Planet and Fodor's for the planing.

Came back from India about a month ago and ended taking the Fodor's for the trip, not the Lonely Planet. Why?

LP has a lot of very detailed info -mostly quantitative: prices, time tables, etc- that is very useful for planing your trip and is geared to users that travel without an itinerary. This is very good for travelers that are very price conscious, unstructured travelers, backpackers and doitallyourselfers that make decisions on the fly and hence need all of this very detailed info, missed the train to Agra, should I take a bus? Where? How much? The only bus stops at Shimla, should I stay? What is there to see/do?

On the other hand, Fodor's has info of a more quantitative nature, that is more useful when you have a more structured trip. What restaurants to visit, what hotel to stay at, etc. There is a big emphasis on the epicurean traveler, costs be dammed, you see it the way the book is organized, were LP talks about the eateries by zone, Fodor's talks about types of food, no matter were the place is, it is assumed that visiting the place is more important that going to the other side of town to do so.

Whenever I stuck to the Fodor's Choice or the Fodor's Recommends, I was gladly surprised by the quality of the service/place that was recommended, the best restaurants, best bars, best experiences, best hotels in every town, they are all there, I even surprised some locals.

At the end, you have to decide what type of travel you'll be doing and buy accordingly.

I was a bit of a fan of Lonely Planet Guide Books until I bought a Kindle Edition of The India Guide.

One of the strong point of the the LP books is usually the maps. It was really an attractive idea that I would be able to carry all my books in one compact electronic gadget.

All was well until I tried reading the maps. They were impossible! Without the capacity to zoom they were impossible to read. I was lost. Maybe a magnifying glass would have helped, but I pretty well gave up. So to Kindle and LP I say that you desperately need to do something about the maps for Kindle. They are useless.

They could work better on the Kindle DX, but then its not so convenient for traveling.

I've been an avid reader of Lonely Planet for almost all my domestic and international travels. So it was not even a question that I took Lonely Planet India for my 6-month living in Tamil Nadu, India. The reviews on cities/towns/hotels/restaurants/sites were all just not very helpful. They were all just blahh blahh blahh. I ditched the book about 2 months into my stay and just googled, used wikitravel and/or mikeindia.com for the rest of my trip. This book is just not worth taking along if you're going to India. It's heavy, bulky and not much help.

Lonely Planet is known for no-nonsense guidebooks that educate the traveler in addition to guiding him/her through the trip. The India guidebook is an exception, however.

Peppered with historical inaccuracies and outright lies, it does disservice to two entities: the reader and the magnificent country that is India.

Instead of me typing 500 words to justify my argument, let me direct you to this excellent article published by a freelance journalist: [...]
[EDIT ON 01/26/11: I did not realize that Amazon deletes hyperlinks from reviews. To find the freelancer's review, type "lonely planet misguidebook girish shahane" in google.]

By allowing such guidebooks to bear its respected name, Lonely Planet will lose credibility and, more importantly, market share. I'm not sure if this book is the result of shoddy quality control paired with a bad author or not, but I am going to be wary of *all* LP guidebooks from now on.

I have been to India on a couple of occasions and a book, no book, will prepare you for a trip like this if you are not familiar with these parts of the world. OK, let's face it, most of the world is familiar with this part of the world - nearly 20%+ lives here and I have yet to find a nation without Indians dwelling there from Canada, to Japan, to the UAE.

I make an assumption that if you are looking for this guide book you are not Indian, if you are, your local knowledge will be far superior yet it may be interesting to see what information us foreign travelers are fed.

Get the book, it is necessary - especially if you are unfamiliar with travel to such destinations. I have travelled a fair amount and not much can prepare you for India. All positive, but perhaps at the time challenging. India will teach you a lot, and you will need patience there as sometimes tings do not go as planned.

This guide will lead you to reliable hostels and gust houses. It will warn you of common scams (there are plenty) and it will point out interesting points to visit. You will quite possibly save your money on this purchase in the first hour upon touchdown to India. Go to India, see how a great majority of the world lives. Go prepared! Buy this book. Buy another guide as well. Read all you can and enjoy as much as you can as you are in for a true sensory experience here.

Never could anyone write a perfect guide book for a nation, especially India. So read and be flexible as things change on the dime there. Use ideas to guide decisions and hold no one accountable being aware that Delhi is quite different than New York. That I promise.

Excellent resource. The guesthouses are a little dated but that is to be expected. Booking your train ticket section is very helpful and straight forward - use the railroad website. The prices quoted in the book are too low. In all, this is the best India guidebook available.

This book is huge! It doesn't travel very well unless you don't mind carrying a brick along with you. It's so extensive that it's likely you couldn't use all of it in one trip anyway... I recommend that you study the sections you'll be traveling to and make copies.

I traveled around India on a hired bike. The book was generally really handy, the exception being the maps. I dont know if there are acurate maps for India but dont rely on these to much, escpecially in Agra. Also if the town had there hindi spelling underneath it may helped my navigating, especially in the North.

Well... I'm an Indian. But still this book taught me and guided me many things about my country which even I didn't know!!!Lonely Planet's books are something one can blindly follow.
First of all India is so verse by culture nature and people that no single book can guide in n out, but still this single book dares to cover most of the point of interest, tourist places, major cities and historical places. It has got wealth of information on transport, accommodation; sightseeing, fare, maps Do's and Don'ts etc. A must book for every India traveller (whether Indian or foreigner)