Lonely Planet Eastern Europe 11th Ed.: 11th Edition [Paperback]

We travel for two months at a time each year. The last two years were in Turkey -- as will be this year's trip. Our practice is to travel cheap, moving from place to place in short hops every couple days. For the next three years, we plan to do the same thing in the Balkans. I ordered this guide to aid in planning our trips.

First, I would like to address comments in two other reviews. Yes, this is a heavy book. I don't know if I would actually take it on the trip. And on my copy the blue tabs are all properly labeled. My experience has been that the Kindle edition is awkward to use for detailed planning, but is great for traveling. We often whip out the Kindle in bus stations and on street corners when we need a refresher.

Eastern Europe is a big bite to chew up in one book. Lonely Planet, in my opinion, does an excellent job, within limits. It would be rediculous to expect the same coverage as a single-country, dedicated guide would provide. But combined with the Internet it is proving to be an excellent planning tool.

We will be traveling to multiple countries. Until I received this guide, I found it difficult to put everything into perspective well enough to make travel plans. I would not recommend this guide for someone visiting only one country, but I cannot imagine another single source that would be as helpful to the multi-country traveler.

And I particularly appreciate that Lonely Planet includes common phrases for all the languages one might expect to find.

If a book like this assists in avoiding even one blunder, it is worth the price.

I'm a big fan of Lonely Planet and have used several of their guides, mostly in the Kindle format. I must say, LP has been very inconsistent in how they've ported their books to the Kindle platform. The big difference is the TOC and linking. In South America on a shoestring, the content was broken up and linked better. I could swipe to move between chapters on individual locations. In this book, a swipe takes me to an entirely different country. There's nothing dividing up the content within those chapters outside of the TOC at the beginning of the country chapter or a couple of links in the introductory pages for each country.

Worse, there are a great deal of sites that are invisible from the TOC. These might be secondary sites or day trips from major cities (chapters). The only way to find these is to read through the entire chapter for a city, page by page. And the only way to find them again is to highlight or bookmark those pages. So, basically I end up creating my own index for the content, scouring each linked section page by page, highlighting interesting points so I can find them again later.

And for big chapters, let's say "Krakov," if I want to find just the transportation section one more time, quickly. Unless I've had the foresight to anticipate this, I'm either paging ONE by ONE through all of the Krakov section or going to the Poland main page, clicking the chapter after Krakov, then paging backward, searching for what I want and hoping there aren't too many side-trips from Krakov. That's completely weak. Aren't drop downs a possibility on this platform? Is a bigger TOC for each of the countries all that hard?

I don't know if this is a Kindle thing or a Lonely Planet thing. But the usability of this material has a long, long way to go. You can do better.

OH, finally, whose idea was it to make the key features, like museums and viewpoints, SMALL and GRAY text next to normal, black text. Seriously. It doesn't make it more readable. Less. I'm reading...squinting. Reading...squinting. Come on.

I love lonely planet. That being said, I hated this book. When I compared it to the individual countries I didn't think I was losing "that much." While on vacation I came across a copy of the Romania lonely planet. It put this book to shame. Fork out the extra cash, carry the extra books. You will be happy you did.