Lonely Planet Great Britain (Travel Guide)

There are plenty of slim, colorful travel guides out there which cater to travelers wanting a quick look at the standard top ten attractions. They need only just enough information to get to those attractions and back. However, some enterprising travelers want a more in-depth experience, and more information up front about their destinations. For those travelers, fortunately there is lonely planet, and their guide to Great Britain.This guide covers England, Wales, and Scotland in a fair amount of detail while still being relatively portable. Britain has a stunning amount of scenic country, and more above-ground history than you might imagine. This guide gives a good sense of flavor and lots of choices, whether for general exploring or outdoor recreation or special items of interest. The book has lots of useful text, with a helpful mixture of maps, pictures and graphics. Very well recommended for the first-time visitor to Great Britain.

I actually pretty recently decided to sit down with the book to try to plan a trip. I had previously flipped around the book before and noticed that the format is drastically different from older editions and stuck little bookmarks on areas to circle back on when I was ready to seriously plan.It wasn't until I actually decided to read through it that I noticed that the changes were disastrous.One of the things I liked about Lonely Planet previously is that it broke down each location into regions (with a map) and then would subdivide it into attractions, places to stay, places to eat, places to drink and nightlife and shopping. Some of the 2021 books still have this format (I have a copy of the 2021 Japan guide, which I have included a picture of alongside this book in the photos). If you wanted to see a particular attraction in a particular area it was easy to figure out and plan where you would stay and eat.The new guide at first could be mistaken for the old one, but the one notices that they are playing the same trick all of us did on school reports (or at least I did) of making the typeface size large so less text fills up the page and inserting lots of (admitted often nice) pictures, maps and diagrams to fill up the page. Gone is most of the information on anything other than the biggest and most obvious tourism sites. "The British Museum"? Yeah anybody with two functioning neurons would know that it's a "must see". A lot of the useful information on places to eat, drink and importantly stay, has been banished to the margins and is often austere in details. For *the entire city of London* they list a whopping 6 accommodations, including such obscure gems as The Four Seasons hotel. Out of these six, all are pricey except for one, a YHA. How pricey? Nobody knows, there's no pound estimate.Frankly the book, while certainly prettier than just randomly Googling "travel *city name*" is not a lot more useful, even with how terrible Google has gotten with SEO parasites clogging up the results. Which apparently is not terribly surprising given that the company that acquired LP in 2020, Red Ventures, is a SEO marketing and media company which has been responsible for you seeing "The Points Guy" spam everywhere.So 2 stars, it's certainly still looks sort of like the old LP guides with their clean and pretty aesthetic. But it's not really a functional guide on it's own, for most travelers you would need another source of info or an agent. I'd recommend either buying (ideally take a look inside) older LP guide books in the old format (and 2x checking to make sure these businesses are still open because... pandemic) or looking elsewhere. (Either other guide books, or using online resources like wikivoyage/wikitravel)

I've been a customer of LP since 1987. There are 8 other LP guidebooks on my bookshelf right now. Over the years, I tried then shunned all other travel guidebooks in favor of Lonely Planet guides for a dozen reasons. In fact, in the past twenty or so years, every time I talk to anyone about my travels, I tell them to get a Lonely Planet guide - they're the best! I've even seen my name in print in a couple of editions in the list of the hundreds of travelers who have submitted tips, ideas, and stories. Alas, those days are gone. Dear LP: Congratulations on your redesigned guidebooks - you've succeeded in turning them into every other guidebook out there. There is nothing that differentiates LP guides from every other travel guide: gone are the out of the way and lesser-known sites; gone are the useful maps; gone are all the very reasons I bought so many LP guidebooks over the years. I'm so sad to see you go. What's wrong with the new maps? I'll be happy to tell you: your 50-Shades-of-Gray theme is practically unreadable except under the brightest of light. I cannot tell you how many times while reading the Great Britain guidebook that I've struggled to determine what the shading on a map indicates only to finally realize it was a colored box bleeding through from the other side of the page. And what happened to connecting the map to the text? In the past two weeks reading the Great Britain guidebook, nearly every time I came across a place mentioned in the book and tried to find it on your maps, it wasn't there. I don't need page after page of 4-day or 5-day or any-day bike trips, or bus trips, or car trips. I'm a big boy and I can and do plan my own trips. The beauty of LP guides used to be that they told me the neat, off-beat, and interesting things to be found when I got there and along the way - whether it took me an hour or a week to get there. The restaurant/roadhouse at the end of a 60-mile dirt road in the Australian outback. The Fukuyama Auto & Clock Museum in Japan, where the owner, who went to college in Kansas, met us outside and gave us a personal tour, insisting that my friends and I get in several of his museum exhibit vehicles so he could take photos to show his friends the Americans who visited. These places were the soul of Lonely Planet guidebooks, and so many others that I can't immediately remember. Your new guides, the consistency of oatmeal, now read like pamphlets from the local Chambers of Commerce and they now provide little more information than I can get online with minimal effort. If you can't tell by now, I'm not a fan of your new format. You've lost "you," and I'm sorry, so sorry, for that. You had something good there, but you lost it. Actually, you didn't lose it, you purposefully steered away from it and that is the hardest thing to swallow; I'm so disappointed. I'll miss traveling without you.

Prior versions of Lonely Planet Guides have included extensive detailed listings of sites as well as reviews of various restaurants, venues, tourist sites. This new version reduces the number of listings to the five most valued by the authors. I always used to count on Lonely Planet for the universe of listings. Apparently no longer.

This one on Great Britain is like all the rest - full of useful and often unique information that makes a trip extra special rather than cookie-cutter tourist issue.

Unter den Reiseführern finden wir die Lonely Planet Serie am überzeugendsten, da hier die relevanten Informationen kompakt und auf die wesentlichen Highlights fokusiert dargestellt werden. Wir habe dieses Jahr (2024) einen UK Roadtrip (vom Süden bis Schottland und zurück) unternommen und dieser Reiseführer hat uns sehr geholfen, sich gut auf die Ziele vorzubereiten und ein Maximum aus den Besuchen der verschiedenen Orte zu ziehen.

The new layout and design of the Lonely Planet looks fantastic however the content is very average and significantly worse than the previous versions of Lonely Planet both in my opinion and many others by the reviews i gave read. They seem to have lost their way. I'll be trying Rough Guide for my next travel guide.

we are going on a trip and was told to get this book

At first look, the guide looks beautiful with a lot of info. In truth, it’s poorly organized compared to what we’re used to in a lonely planet making it pretty hard to plan a travel. We didn’t really use it.Don’t buy it