Customer Reviews

The Rough Guide to Greece 12 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

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

 

 

We spent two weeks in Greece -- 9 days on the mainland and the Peloponnese, and 6 days on the islands. Not an hour went by that we didn't refer to our Rough Guide! It is packed full of fantastic information and led us in all the right directions.

There were a few gems of our trip that I was surprised weren't mentioned in the book, so if you're planning on spending longer than a week on the islands, you may want to consider buying a guidebook specifically written for them.

All in all, I recommend this book if you want just one good, general guidebook for Greece.

I bought kindle edition. Thought that it's better to take only small kindle and not big book when travelling. Hmm - was not so good idea. Compared to printed edition, it's hard to make some overview about the guide content and navigate quickly to the chapters and sections you are interested. Kindle edition has lack of formatting, graphics, emphasized text, text frames which are very important in orientation within book. Navigate through the subchapters and sections must be done only by turning pages. The maps can't be zoomed so the names of the streets isn't readable. Compared e.g. to PDF loaded from lonelyplanet's web page, it's possible to have readable guide in kindle, but kindle edition must improve before it will be usable for travelling.
Anyway I put 3 stars as the content of this book is as I expected from this type of guide. Good to get some rough knowledge about foreign country.

I bought this book based on the reviews on Amazon for this book vs. Lonely Planet. Additionally, I heard Rick Steve's book on Greece was horrible. I usually love Lonely Planet and Rick Steve, so those are my default brands. After I purchased the Rough Guide, I ended up borrowing Frommer's book from the library and my traveling companion bought Lonely Planet. As a general observation, none of the guidebooks were perfect, which was a disappointment. However, in the end, I liked the Frommers the best. It was the easiest to understand and gave the most in-depth coverage of each of the islands I visited, plus Athens. The recommended itineraries in Frommers were also the most on point with advice I received from people who either lived in or visited Greece (notably, I never found the recommended itineraries in Rough Guide). The next best guide was Lonely Planet, which had the best maps. Rough Guide came in third, and I wish I had not spent the money on it. Unfortunately, I could not return it because my dog bit the Rough Guide right before I packed it up to return it.

Making good use of the information in this book for an upcoming Greece trip. It also came highly recommended by Rick Steves so need I say more.

This 12th edition of Rough Guide to Greece is a massive disappointment. First of all it has more than a hundred fewer pages than the 10th edition published in May of 2004 just before the Athens Olympics. Fromm 1168 pages to 1014 pages. New management? Whatever the explanation it should be nearly 10 percent less informative than that earlier edition (I did not purchase the 11th edition).
Also, in the 10 edition there is fulsome praise for the Cecil Hotel on Athinas Street in Athens. The praise in the 12th edition has been toned down but the hotel is still recommended. Since I stayed there one night on RG's recommendation, I can tell you it is somewhere between a dump and a rat trap. We might ask ourselves if someone's palm isn't getting greased (?).
In the tenth edition the town of Lavrion where many ferries leave for the Aegean islands received some negative comments and in the 12th it has completely disappeared. Maybe it fell into the sea between editions. But I would really like to have some updated information about the town and its restaurants and hotels.
Maybe the publishers and writers of RG are resting on their laurels for the time being. In the past they have put out a wonderful guide to Greece and have deserved and gotten high praise from critics. Makes you wonder what is going on nowadays