Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Vancouver (City Guide)

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We just recently made a 2 night/ 3 day trip to Vancouver from Seattle. We pretty much depended on this guide 100%, having not really planned a great deal until the day before our trip (we planned using the book on the 4 hour Amtrak ride up). I'll break down my review by reasons NOT to buy this book.

Reasons not to buy this book:
1) It's outdated. Twice, we traveled to two recommendations that no longer provided what the book explained it would. We tried going to one of its restaurant recommendations - Social at Le Magasin, which turned out to have closed down. Second, the book recommend we pick up sandwiches at this one restaurants to-go window on our way to Stanley Park and it turned out the place only sold fish and chips. Fortunately, we Yelped a great delicattessan nearby (that the guide did not mention at all).

2) It's restaurant reviews are awful. For our main restaurant outing in Vancouver, we decided on the books recommendation of Goldfish - a "$$-$$$" place with supposedly great food. First off, the place was extremely pricey, second, the food was horrible. At least the wine was good. Then, again, we went to one of its recommendations on Granville Island called Bridges. This place turned out to be a complete tourist trap with over-priced crap. I realized, when sinking my teeth into wiggly "fried" calamari that everyone there was a tourist. Later, we realized there was a fantastic public market nearby with all kinds of wonderful food. This guide tends to recommend restaurants that are VISIBLE, not necessarily good places.

3) It just doesn't print a good picture of Vancouver. It consistently states that you can spend the better part of the day in certain places (Granville island for example), and that just isn't true. Granville island can be done in 3 hours while moving at a snail's pace. Also, it never warned us about the panhandlers in Gastown and Chinatown. We're from San Francisco and don't mind bums asking for money, but they could have warned us that this Canadian panhandlers would jump into a story and end it with a request for a loaf of bread and peanut butter. If the guide had warned us, we wouldn't have spent time listening to this random stranger and would have told him off. C'mon! 500 hours of research and you never mention this to an unsuspecting traveler? 500 hours of research my a**!

I was going to end the review here, but I will say SOME good things about it.

It lead me to Irish Heather (a cool pub)and recommended riding bikes in Stanley Park. Those are the only two good things it lead us to.

As other reviewers mentioned, this guide is disorganized but we used it more for their overall opinion of the city and used plenty of their recommendations for must sees. For the price, it did its thing.

I LOVE the Lonely Planet, I think they do amazing country guides when traveling, I swear by these books! I was pleasantly surprised to learn they do many city guides and equally so when I saw Vancouver, BC was one of them--perfect timing for my upcoming trip!

The guide was well-written, easy to follow and was clearly composed by someone who has spent an enormous amount of time in the area. All the recommendations were spot-on: restaurants, walking tours, recommended activities.

What more can I say then, The Lonely Planet--You succeeded once again!