What are your favorite Travel Guide books besides Rick Steves?

Still working on your plan to create guide books for the other parts of the World?

Lonely Planet. DK Eyewitness.

Moon Oaxaca

-- Mike Beebe

No Claudia I’m just curious because other users on this site have compared other guidebooks to his as well. Even Rick Steve himself made a page comparing his travel guidebooks to other travel guidebooks.

Lonely Planet -- though most recent ones seem not as good as in the past.
Rough Guide -- but not updated very often

DKEyewitness and the Michelin red and green guides. I have used the Michelin guides for many years.

The new Lonely Planet guides are useless in my opinion. They’ve stripped out all practical info and everything that made the guide great and filled them with instagram pics and aspirational text. It is too bad because they used to be my ”go to” for areas that RS did not cover. I wonder what Tony and Maureen Wheeler think.

Now, I primarily focus on publication date when looking for guides. I try to check out the book at the library before I buy. When I went to New Zealand learlier this year, I found Frommers to be the most up-to-date and most helpful. The 2021 edition of Lonely Planet New Zealand was also good (although outdated), but the 2023 edition had the horrible new format. In the past, I’ve also used Rough Guides and Bradt Guides.

I like DK Eyewitness books a lot. The country books give a good idea of what you can do in a specific area of the country, the descriptions are helpful (with lots of photos) to decide which places to choose. For a short stay in a city, they give a good day-by-day plan and a few walking tours for neighborhoods and for top sights. The city specific books are great if you plan to spend more than 2-3 days in a city. The backroads series is good for planning, well, a road trip. Sicily was very useful for my 2 week visit mostly by car.

For the last few years I've used Lonely Planet guides to supplement the RS guides, which leave out large swaths of countries. The LP restaurant recs are pretty good. I buy the Kindle edition and do my research online. LP has good city maps that I can print out. It's also easy to cut/paste portions of the book to word docs to take with me. And of course I have the whole guide on my phone and my laptop while I'm traveling.

Those are my 3. I use the guide books mostly for planning and self-guided tours, sometimes for restaurant recs, rarely for lodging.

I use the "Moon" travel books quite often, and like them. I also visit our public library and look through what is available there. If there is a travel book that I find especially useful, then I will purchase it.

I agree with Laura and CD in DC that current Lonely Planet guides are no longer useful. I like Rough Guides because I feel they reflect my style of mid range independent travel.

I thought the old Let's Go guides were so much fun back in the 1990s. I am tempted to look for a used copy and see if I find their commentary as amusing as I did back in my twenties.

Depending on where I'm going, I look at Rough Guides and Moon Guides.

However, that being said, I find myself doing more and more research on the internet.

We too prefer the DK Eyewitness guides, and the DK "Backroads" series is excellent for self-drive itineraries.
No one has yet mentioned the Michelin Green Guides which are excellent too. I'd never heard of them until another forum contributor recommended them, but after reviewing the one for Normandy I was impressed enough with its detailed coverage that I grabbed the one for Brittany too in preparation for an upcoming trip to Northern France. They're not full of a lot of pretty pictures but they are chock full of useful information., which is why I'll be bringing them both (along with the RS guide) on our trip.