Vietnam Cambodia Laos & Northern Thailand (Multi Country Travel Guide)
December 10, 2012 
3 Comments
Vietnam Cambodia Laos & Northern Thailand (Multi Country Travel Guide)
“The Mekong. It’s an exotic name guaranteed to fire up the imagination. Riding high on the global hotlist, the region is home to such iconic sights as Angkor Wat, Halong Bay and Luang Prabang.” – Nick Ray, Lonely Planet Writer
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Don’t believe their statement of honest reviews,
Having become personally involved in the hospitality branch in Vietnam I can testify that it is not true the writer stays in all of the hotels. I can only speak for Ninh Binh, Vietnam a sleepy town that has seen rising numbers of tourists. Assume the writer would have stayed in all of the hotels. Then he would be grounded for one month in just this place alone. Simple mathemethics tell this is not possible when travelling throughout the country in one half year as he did. So he has Vietnamese informants. And there you have a serious problem.
People who have traveled in Vietnam know that anything can be arranged for some “tea money”. I regularly talk with the local hotel owners and know for a fact that these assistants announce their stay with the remark they are from the Lonely Planet. Needless to say these persons are being treated like royalty. The hotel owner continues to please them by sending a present on the following Vietnamese New Years. That is how some hotels in Vietnam secure their place in the book. I have this confirmed from different sources.
Hotels that were already listed in the previous editions are not re-assessed. The info can be as old as one decade. Some hotels have rested on their laurels and the service and amenities have gone down the hill. Now that there is TripAdvisor, this can easily be detected. Just check the reviews there for the budget hotel in Ninh Binh, that is highly recommended in the book. Reviewers talk about the “trap of Lonely Planet”.
And there are other recommended hotels in the guide book that are very poorly rated on TripAdvisor. Two listed lodgings actually double as a brothel. Others are virtually empty most time of the year. A cook is being praised where he has long left the hotel. The most popular and best rated hotels (different categories) on TripAdvisor and Agoda are not even mentioned in the Lonely Planet. And so on, the out of date or missing info is endless. I simply fail to understand Lonely Planet is still including sleeping facilities in the guide book. Often I hear from travelers most of their info is useless. My advise is don’t buy the Lonely Planet for hotel information, instead read TripAdvisor.
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|Very light on the details,
I travel a lot and always rely on Lonely Planet guidebooks. This is the first one I’ve really been disappointed with. I bought it as a PDF download from the LP store. I’m not disappointed with the format but rather the content. If you’re looking for the normal, comprehensive details of a destination, purchase the individual books. The maps in this combined book are few and far between and have very little detail. And the city details are very high level; hitting only the “highlights”. If you’ll be going anywhere off the normal routes, those destinations are not included. The only advantage I can see to this book is the convenience of not having to carry 4 separate books if you’re visiting all of S.E. Asia.
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|Not enough good detailed maps,
We picked this guide book because it’s the latest in publishing compared to the others. We were going to Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam so it perfectly covered our plans. Unfortunately we found that it did not have enough details of many of the cities, but more importantly did not have good detailed maps.
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