The Rough Guide to Greece - 10th edition (Paperback)

~ Lance Chilton (Author), Marc Dubin (Author), Nick Edwards (Author), Mark Ellingham (Author), John Fisher (Author), Natania Jansz (Author)
Key Phrases: hellenic seaways, Ayía Triádha, Platía Eleftherías, World War, Asia Minor, Ayios Nikólaos (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Famously honest. -- Daily Mail, London, UK

For independent travel, the Rough Guides are the most useful source. -- Daily Telegraph, London, UK

The best currrent general guidebook for Greece. -- CondŽ Nast Traveler, USA --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Description

"...overflowing with first-hand knowledge of the country and its idyllic islands...the precise directions included in the guidebook's 1,100-plus pages are especially welcome..." -travel-travel-travel.com

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1168 pages
• Publisher: Rough Guides; 10th edition (August 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1843532514
• ISBN-13: 978-1843532514
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #937,299 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant! The best of the Greece books, March 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Greece: The Rough Guide, Seventh Edition (7th ed/1998) (Paperback)

A terrific guide to both the Greek mainland and the islands. Spent several months trawling around the country, at first with several guide books, Fodors, Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, etc., but finally found that the Rough Guide knew the country best, and made for a more entertaining travel companion, so I ditched the other books about three weeks into the trip. Absolutely the only book for Greece if you (a) like good food and nightlife and (b) have a serious interest in the cultural context of Ancient Greece. Plus their commentary on modern Greek history was very helpful, must admit I didn't know much about it until I arrived.

You can't go wrong with this book.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars humorous, informative, and insightful, February 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: GREECE: THE ROUGH GUIDE (ROUGH GUIDE TRAVEL GUIDES) (Paperback)

If you like self-depreciating English humor, you'll like the Rough guide to Greece. This book is densely packed with informative and interpretive pages. Not like the Fodor's, etc. which are mostly pretty pictures and ads disguised as recommendations. Even the most biting commentary turned out to be true. I consider this book to have been crucial to a very sucessful vacation/tour.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Just OK, September 3, 2001

By	Roy Gordon (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Rough Guide to Greece, 8th (Greece (Rough Guides)) (Paperback)

This review compares the Lonely Plantet Greece (4th Edition) with the Rough Guide Greece (8th edition). We spent 2.5 weeks in July, 2001 in Greece, our first visit, and these were our guide books.
A relucant 4 stars to each, and a slight preference for RG. We certainly found the books serviceable, and they gave us good ideas of where in Greece we wanted to go. But they were much less valuable in their listings for individual destinations. They were the least valuable compared to the other LP and RG travel books we've used (Portugal, Italy, Thailand, Tokyo).

As usual, they both overstate their hotel rankings which to me make sense only if you've been sleeping out on the beach from necessity, and now have finally scraped some money together for a room. An exagerration, but I've lost patience with gushing praise for facilities which are usually no better than serviceable and sometimes less than that. And, we're not into spending money on fancy accommodations. Occassionaly the books are on the money, but often not.

On the smaller islands RG usually had more accommodation listings, but occassionally LP did. There were at least two instances when LP had none, just saying that rooms were available.

The ferry schedules in the books, pretty much consistent between them, bore little relation to reality, even though we were there in the high season.

I want to complete with my usual gripe about these and other guide books: we don't know which restaurants and hotels were actually visited by the writers (and by which one) and when. To paraphrase from my review of RG Portugal:

LP is out front in saying that its reviewers do not stay at all the hotels or eat at all the restaurants they list. I would like it if the reviews would be initialized by the reviewers with the date. This would allow us to learn each reviewer's tastes and standards, not to mention seeing which places they actually visited.

One LP writer (not I think an author of this book) in discussing restaurants wrote: "As one of those LP writers I can tell you that it is not physically possible to eat even a 'little bit of a meal' in each of those restaurants :-) What we all tend to do is eat at a broad cross-section within the norms of natural eating times and visit the other restaurants and talk to the owner or even the diners if it can be done discretely. In the same vein we don't sleep at every hotel!"

Talk to the owners for your evaluation! Says it all.