– Customer review on 29/05/2011

I've just spent three months travelling round Sri Lanka with both the Rough Guide and the Lonely Planet guide. I have to say, that the Rough Guide proved, on almost all counts, to be the much better option.

Obviously neither guide is perfect - the Rough Guide is excellent on the South coast, but not so good when you travel further north, and both guides fail to give much useful information (or the correct information!) about how to travel around by public bus. However, the Lonely Planet guide is pretty inaccurate throughout. Many of the maps are wrong, for instance, and it fails to actually give a balanced view of whether place is worth visiting. Even if some people might consider the Rough Guide to be too negative, I found that it was quite fair in its judgement of many places - or at least you didn't arrive with inflated expectations that were disappointed, if you'd been reading the Lonely Planet!