Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Turkey, 10th Edition

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We just used this guide -- thankfully supplemented by others -- to travel around western Turkey, including Izmir, Selcuk and Istanbul. We found it uniformly atrocious. Lonely Planet, I think, enjoys telling you *every* available restaurant, hotel, and cultural attraction, and aggressively refuses to filter. Consequently, we ended up staying at an abysmal hotel in Izmir and eating at any number of subpar restaurants. When we switched to the Time Out guide for Istanbul, we had nothing but success. I recommend Time Out Istanbul in the highest possible terms, and DISrecommend Lonely Planet Turkey with the same intensity.

Come ivsit Turkey and use Lonely Planet to help you with your tour! I have lived in Turkey for a year. The Lonely Planet goes everywhere with us...it is worn and bent and highlighted and marked up and excellent. We have been completely happy with all the suggestions from LP. Here is the thing. Turkey is a fabulous country, however, there are a few things LP cannot control.

1. The prices are inaccurate but that is not LPs fault. The Lira is very unstable and has had an outragous inflation rate. Also, you have to be good at bargaining to get a good rate and most of us Westerners are uncomforatble with this.

2. Directions/ getting around....the majority of Turks rely on public transportation. There are VERY FEW road signs if you are driving. LPs maps are great, but unfortunately hard to follow without signs. I know people are sometimes frustrated with the bus routes...they can be inconvienent and drop off in the middle of the night, and hard to find your way around if you don't speak Turkish....again not LPs fault. Just keep asking for someone who speaks English to help you and the hospitable people of Turkey will find someone.

I find LPs history background one of the best things about it. It is just enough to get you interested in seeing a place and you can supplement it by GOING to the museums. We have been 100% satisfied, but you must have realiztic expectations.

Im not the kind of guy that usually buys travel guides, but I was impressed with this lonely planet. It has excellent coverage and ideas for alternative trips, and this is the new version which was printer in Apr 07 (so its very upto date) worth purchasing!!

From pensions to informative summaries on the ruins this book covered all basis. The guide was accurate in their description of places and allowed us to travel around freely without assistance even though we had only about 20 words of Turkey under our belt. It came back well worn and happy.

Reading the accommodation sections throughout the book and comparing them to the REALITY, I am getting the following impression about "how it works": a person from the Lonely Planet contacts the property and says: "Hi, I am from Lonely Planet travel guide! Would you please tell me how much your rooms are?". The property owners (especuially in Turkey!....) immediately sense a great opportunity for them (their propery is going to be listed in the worldwide travel guide! wow!) and respond to the Lonely Planet with some totally irrelevant, dirt cheap and UNTRUE rates. What happens next? The Lonely Planet prints out that garbage, in many thousand copies. How come EVERY property I contacted quoted me the prices being MULTIPLE TIMES higher, than what the newest, crisp copy of this book says?! I had especially unpleasant experience with the "prominent" Shoestring Pansion in Goreme. When I requested an explanation why the prices they quoted were multiple times higher than the ones listed in the book, our nice and friendly correspondence has abruptly ended. I have never received another word from them. So.... expect to pay for your accommodations in Turkey much more than the Lonely Planet listings and for the Lonely Planet I would wish to investigate the hotel prices in a little more professional way, before they actually give them away to the world.
Very disappointing!

The book is great, I just used it in 2011 and naturally the only thing that needed to be updated was the pricing, which is to be expected.

This book is absolutely amazing for traveling in Turkey. There are a few errors in it along the way, but I would have been so lost without it! Indispensable!

The proper name of the country is TURKIYE, not turkey. Why do the english speaking countries change the names of all existing countries but yet force those countries to use their own created names? for instance USA. This should not be so. If an existing country has their own name, it shouldnt be changed, therefore it's TURKIYE...........please make a note in the future