Chris Ashworth Books

Bought Lonely Planet's Central Europe guide. Good and fast service. Will use same supplier in future if needed.

Naturally, because of the number of countries this book covers, it is far less detailed about any one country than Lonely Planet guides covering single countries or a smaller number of countries. Still, for my purposes--a 15-day motorcoach tour including Frankfurt, Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Budapest, Vienna, and Prague, with just a day and a half or so in each city--it proved adequate. Few people will have room enough in their carry-on or checked luggage to carry a book for each country visited during such a tour, so one is stuck with a single multi-country guidebook.

I don't understand why Lonely Planet included Switzerland and Slovenia in this book. If one is traveling to Krakow or Prague, one usually doesn't travel to Switzerland during the same trip.

My basis for comparison was the Lonely Planet guide to Belgium. Belgium's a small country and the guidebook covered just Belgium, so the editors had room for all kinds of fascinating descriptions and inset articles providing detail, such as several articles about beer styles, breweries, and top pubs, battlegrounds, and the scatalogical nicknames Belgians have for people of other cities. That was the best guidebook I've ever used.

My boyfriendand I travel a lot, and we usually take a lonely planet along with us.
The Central europe one, we've only used it for the Check Republic. It was alright but we think that the tips you usually get in this guide seemed to be missing. For the basics is fine, but we weren't totally satisfied with it. We understand that is not only about one country, that includes other's as well and the information is shortened, but anyway,it was of help only to a point.

We hope this information is of help for you,
kind regards
Lucila Lauda and Ulrik Bechtold

I have been a faithful consumer of Lonely Planet products for the last five years. However, this collection does little more than offer superficial information on every country in Central Europe. If you want to go anywhere besides the capitals and most well-known tourist "traps", forget it. I was particularly dissapointed with the book's treatment of Germany and Switzerland. Very vague, very minimal. If you want to visit any of the countries in Central Europe, buy the Lonely Planet Guide to that country or look for a different publisher. Sorry guys, this one doesn't go in my travel bag.

There aren't too many guides out there specific to Central Europe. The book was helpful for general reference but, lacked any good detail for traveling. The maps were somewhat helpful, but always seemed to be just limited enough so it didn't show where you wanted to go. The book is great for the tourist that doesn't want to get away from touristy places. If you want to go local this book is not helpful. And what is it about travel books? When are they going to make a travel book that you can seperate out the sections you want? If you don't want to carry around some 10 lb brick of a book and only the sections you need. I know the technology is out there.

You probably know what I mean with "showcase books", lot of samples of design works, few comments about the case studies. Well this book fall within this category, but it's an interesting alternative containing layout experiments, style exercises and funny, very funny fake trademarks and corporate identities studies. You will see packaging for DNA-mutating cereals, advertising for software upgrade for human brain, lots of nonsense but quite inspiring.
Again, if you're looking for something to read, this is not your book, but it's a funny one to watch.
What do I like most? The thermo-sensitive inks used for the cover :-)