S Europe Travel

» Mike Gerrard - The best guidebooks

It depends on the destination. I like Rough Guides, Lonely Planet and Time Out guides, but generally I find Lonely Planet not as thorough as the other two. It's all down to the individual author(s), though. I know when we traveled around Crete researching our own guidebook, we found some real howlers in the Lonely Planet guide. I also once wrote a piece for the Times travel pages comparing what different guidebooks to Greece said about the same places. It's an instructive exercise. You'd expect opinions to be different, but facts are often different in every single guidebook!