Greece: The Rough Guide (Rough Guide to Greece) [Paperback]

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.

This Rough Guide was above all very practical -- it simply is amazingly detailed, and what's more, it's mostly right. The rooms , hotels, and restaurants suggested were spot on. Very few outdated entries.

This guide also includes much relevant background info on Greek history, politics, food, an so on. This made for a much more interesting trip.

The paper was very thin yet high quality, making this guide even more worth its space in my pack.

This is definitely not the guide for organized tours -- the authors make no secret of their disdain for package tourism and the spoiling it often brings. But, for the independent traveller, this is the best guide I have found in English or French.

Many nightspots get renovated; names get changed, etc. That's something the editors can't really help with. But any restaurant or bar I went to (listed in the guide) was above-average, if not better than they claimed.

The historical data was also well-balanced; so you're not bored to tears with it, and yet it's detailed enough to keep you reading through it. Bonus marks for the great inclusion of the Greek music coverage (flawed, but excellent), and the price of the book is decent.