Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Caribbean Islands (Multi Country Guide)

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At 800+ pages, this is too heavy to lug around, but it's perfect for planning a trip and deciding where to visit. After you've planned your itinerary, I suggest buying a more specialized LP (Lonely Planet) guide to take with you - a small price to pay for a successful vacation.

Cuba gets the longest chapter (a whopping 59pp), followed by the Dominican Republic (48pp), Trinidad & Tobago (47pp), Bahamas (43pp), and Jamaica (42pp). However, the book's warnings about Jamaican crime will cause most travellers to rethink their itinerary. Haiti receives a token 18 pages due to the turmoil there. At the other end of the spectrum, the shortest chapters are on Saba and St. Eustatius (10pp each).

I enjoy the LP writing style, and I like their emphasis on practical tidbits. For example, don't fly directly from Aruba to the U.S. because you'll be in line for two hours at the Aruba airport due to understaffing by U.S. customs officers (yes, U.S.) who handle pre-clearance procedures. This is the kind of nuts-and-bolts information for which LP is famous, and enables visitors to avoid vacation hell.

Pet peeves: The chapters covering the 26 jurisdictions seem to be in random order - why not alphabetical? LP has always been famous for their maps, but lately their maps have been using one shade of gray for water and a slightly different shade of gray for land, which is tough on the eyes.

As usual, the Lonely Planet book delivers tons of information for travelers of all incomes. Especially helpful are tips on where to go to avoid cruise ship crowds. However, I had to skip the chapter on Cuba, because of the US travel ban. And the chapters on Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic should probably only be used to decide whether or not you want to go to those places. If so, you should probably buy the Lonely Planet books dedicated exclusively to them.

I've used Lonely Planet guidebooks for years for trips all around the world, and have been pleased with them before, but the accuracy of information in this book is very uneven. We've used this guidebook so far for the USVI, BVI, St Martin, Saba, and Trinidad & Tobago. Some descriptions/maps/etc have been accurate, and some have been abysmally off -- so much so that there's no way the author could have visited the place in question. In our worst-case experience, we made a two-night reservation at a recommended hotel in Trinidad, and it was downright squalid (you might not believe me if I told you the state of the bathroom) -- and I'm someone who happily travels without much in the way of creature comforts (which is why I'm a Lonely Planet reader to begin with). We wound up looking in the phone book, making a few calls, and found a great, inexpensive hotel not far away that wasn't even listed in the guidebook.

If you're the kind of traveler that fits the "Lonely Planet demographic" (as opposed to, say, a Frommers type of traveler), then this guidebook might still be your best bet for preparing for a trip. Just be prepared to double-check the info, and maybe spend a little time hunting around the area where the map says something is.