Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Costa Rica

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Just got back from Costa Rica (2 wks), and had a good time, though it wasn't without serious disappointment.

While there we noticed that almost all the guidebooks people were carrying around were Lonely Planet (LP). But everywhere we stayed that LP raved about was very disappointing, and the few places we stayed that were very understated in LP were excellent.

My theory is that so many people are using LP that if a place gets a rave recommendation the business just pours in. They jack up their prices, sit back and rest on their reputation, and the facility and service deteriorate. But the money keeps pouring in because of that great LP review. Meanwhile the underrated places have to work their butts off to get business. Even though LP CR is only 2 years old, the prices of the highly rated hotels were off by as much as 50%, whereas the ones with understated descriptions were right on.

Generally, I like using LP, but for CR I would say that too many people do. Grab a different guidebook and cross-ref it with LP. If it has a nice sounding place that's not in LP, stay there!

We also used Frommer's even though it doesn't have much of a selection of budget places. Frommer's descriptions are so much more colorful and accurate. You get the impression that they only write about places for which they have first-hand knowledge. Plus Frommer's 2004 edition is new and the prices were exactly right. But, it's not sufficient by itself because it just doesn't list enough places.

Our rule of thumb for LP CR: If LP writes more than half a column about a hotel or lodge, avoid it! It will be overrated by now, with ridiculously high prices, and an inattentive staff.

Next gripe related to the advice in this guidebook: all the concerns and warnings are grossly exagerated. The roads are bad, but they don't swallow cars and break axles. There may be some crime, but there aren't people learching in the shadows to flatten your tires every time you stop. The busy season doesn't fill every hotel -- in fact without reservations, we got our first choice of hotels every night. I wonder how much more fun my trip would have been if I hadn't let this book make me so defensive!

Here's a tip for Costa Rican hotels: it doesn't matter how expensive the place is, the showers are lousy, with very little hot water and terrible water pressure. So don't pay $45 for a place just because it has hot showers when the place next door is only $25.

I ended up a few weeks and travelling through parts of Central America. This travel guide is one of the ones I took with me, and I highly recommend it.

This guide proved to be invaluable, and saved me a lot of headaches and money. Traveling solo, I rarely make reservations or plans until I actually get there. This is what I did when I got to Costa Rica.

Thanks to this LP guide I can report the following highlights: $7 per night hotel room in San Jose, watching a live volcano (Arenal), spending time in the hot springs at the base of a live volcano, visiting a coffee plantation, hiking through Cloud Forest, and seeing several breathtaking waterfalls. Travelling through Nicaragua to Tortugero to watch the endangered turtles lay eggs was definitely a worthwhile adventure.

A few words of advice: If you are going to visit the rain forest, bring a poncho. It rains in the rain forest. A lot, especially during the rainy season. Perhaps that is why they call it a rain forest. Secondly, visit the local tourist offices in San Jose. I went in looking for some free maps, and got a lot of good advice. It never hurts to have some extra advice about where to go to supplement the guide.

A little dense, it becomes hard to visualize places when planning a trip, but the real value is when you are the ground and moving. Highly recommended.

I have used Lonely Planet guides for the past 8 years during my travels everywhere from Cambodia to New Zealand to Japan, and they have yet to disappoint... until now. I'm sure that this book was once good, but it was written nearly two years ago, and Costa Rica has changed so much since then.

With the recent real estate/construction boom, this book is simply too old. I spent a month in Costa Rica (Nov./Dec. 2001) and found that in many towns HALF of the hotels and restaurants mentioned in this book no longer exist or are under new names/ownership. Also, there is a large number of new lodging places that have been built in the past years that LP excludes. Many of these are the best deals in town.

For the ones that it does include, prices are slightly outdated (although not horrible). Bus schedules are less than accurate (understandable for a two year old book). Especially in remote places like Corcovado, this book was of little help and in certain cases genuinely misleading about ways to get around and the distance of certain extended hikes.

Like I said, I use LP books all the time and they are usually great. I'm sure a 5th edition would fix 90% of the problems with this book, but until then I would strongly recommend a different publication. My friend had the Moon Handbooks guide (which I had never used before) and it was significantly better than the LP in all aspects but maps. My recommendation would be to get that book (or a different one if you know that it is newly printed) and a DETAILED map of the country. That should treat you fine until the 5th edition LP comes out.

Enjoy your trip!

We used this book when traveling through Costa Rica as well as the Explore Costa Rica by Harry Pariser. The Lonely Planet Guide was a little out of date. It seems like many places and events have changed in Costa Rica since the book was written. We found that Pariser's book was much more complete, fun to read, and accurate. The in-depth ecological commentary was greatly appreciated. Lonely Planet can sometimes be overrated.

I've read and used both this book and Moon's Costa Rica Handbook. The latter is by far the better of the two and contains about twice the information.

In preparing for a four-week trip to Costa Rica, I bought both the Lonely Planet Guide and Moon Handbook to Costa Rica. Although both were very good, I would give the edge to the Moon Handbook which provided more detailed and personalized descriptions of places to stay, eat, and visit.
I have used Lonely Planet books in many parts of the world and have long considered them my travel Bible. However, I have noticed that they seem to have lost some of their spark and have become more mainstream and institutionalized in recent years.
For those planning an extensive trip to Costa Rica, I would suggest buying both Moon and Lonely Planet guides as each provides information and insights the other lacks. But I would give Moon the edge if you are planning to purche only one.

i went to langage school in alajuela, costa rica for 8 weeks and needed a good guide book. i have used/reviewed other guide books for other trips (frommers, etc) and found that this book is far better. this book is for everybody, but is realy good for budget travelers. this book includes maps of ALL the towns (small towns too!) that you want to viset! (other books dont have this!) It also lists all the information you could ever need in not only major areas, but small areas as well. negitives: sometimes its hard to find specific info without looking for a few min. (its there, just a little hard to find). And i wish a new version would come out more often. (i had no problem using my 3 year old copy though) over all this book is great and you only need to buy it and no other guide book.

This book of course cannot cover everything but it was as good as it can get for what I had expected. I travel often and have used many types of guides. For this particular trip I had resources of 3 guidebooks total, this one by far was the favorite. While traveling I ran into various other people with the same book and the same opinion that the book was so useful, informative and very objective. I highly recommend it, and highly recommend when you return from the trip, take the time out to give feedback to the authors to help improve and broaden the perspectives of what can be seen in Costa Rica. Your experiences matter, so share them.

Having just returned from Costa Rica I would like to stress on a view previously heard here. If you plan on any kind of BUDGET cuts, e.g:
- take buses
- sleep in budget accomodation
- and/or backpack
then this is REALLY NOT the book for you.
I will not elaborate more on what the book does contain (see below) but will stress that it does NOT contain crucuial information on the above categories.
Many buses are missing / wrong. Budget accomodations (up to 20$/person) are very poorly researched. Simply no way to distinguish a dump from good value.
Two bold examples:
* Puntarenas was found to be every bit the seedy scary port town Puerto Limon is. If you read LP you'd think this was Punta del Este, Uruguay (a resort town).
* Read 15 pages of blurb on Tortuguero and when you finish them you realize you still have NO CLUE as to HOW to get there apart from entering the Hilton asking for a 250$ tour.
And I could go on...
Options: Moon or Footprint costa rica handbooks. They simply MUST be better...

Lonely Planet is always on the money with their guide books, but the Costa Rica edition is even better than average. It has everything you could conceivably need to know, and if it doesn't have it, it tells you how to find out.

The info. was up to date when I went there, but Costa Rica is such a friendly and easy going place, that it doesn't really matter which hotel or restaurant you eat at. Just ask a friendly local and they will be more than willing to help you out. The only drawback is that some of the maps are not detailed enough if you are planning to take some of the backroads, so get a roadmap in addition to this book. However, that is a small price to pay for such an indispensable little guide.

But remember, it is just a guide, not an instruction manual. You will have a better trip if you discover some stuff out for yourself, rather than going to the first "attraction" that LP suggests and finding 100 other tourists walking around with the same guidebook in their hand!

Oh yeah, and not to mention, it is impossible to destroy an LP guide. Later.