Guides by Lonely Planet Reviews

I used Guides all the time. It was honestly one of my favorite apps. I planned three vacations using it and even used it to find new things in the cities I’ve lived in. I liked Guides so much, whenever I bought a physical travel book they became my go-to publisher. I always thought that the amount of content that they offered for free was too good to last, and I liked Guides enough that I would have been willing to pay for the content if they’d handled this better. The way they went, however, putting EVERYTHING behind a paywall and only allowing you to subscribe to their entire catalog for $40 a year is crazy and seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how people use Guides . I just the other day recommended Guides to a friend planning a trip to Berlin, and now I’m going to have to retract that.

Why would I pay $40 a year to access 8000 locations when I only want to use two this app at a time, one to plan a single vacation in one city and one to poke around for restaurants and shops in my home city? I don’t want unlimited access to 8000 locations! I didn’t use Guides to idly poke around the attractions in cities I’m not going to visit for years, if ever. The sensible way to do this would be to let users buy individual cities. If I could buy an app guide for $5-$10 a pop, I would absolutely do that without blinking an eye.

I’ve had the opportunity to travel around the world and I’ve used another pocket size book/guide (won’t mention name) and I love every bit of it, before my trip, during my trip and even after. However they didn’t have the book I needed for my next trip (Japan). My local Barnes and noble recommend Lonely Planet and so far I’m impressed. I leave in a few weeks and I’m feeling confident about having the book and app for my trip. Any questions that I may have had, lonely planet has answered already. Questions that I didn’t even think about they already answered. Thank you!

I decided to take a look at Guides after reading the glowing reviews. Alas, my limited experience has left me wanting. I recently took a trip to Austin and beforehand did a ton of research to figure out all the best places to go. I didn’t spend a penny. So when I found Guides, I decided to see what they felt was worth seeing in Austin, not realizing there was a pay wall. After a little looking, I noticed that, while there are a few more worthwhile locations that I missed, there are also a few prime spots that Guides missed as well. Then it started telling me I needed a subscription. Huh? I’m not asking for a travel agent. All this information is free elsewhere on the internet. Yet you want me to pay $40/year? When the public has no way of suggesting places you guys missed? Umm no. It may be nicely organized and developed, but that’s not worth a subscription. Maybe a one-time payment. Maybe.

I made a purchase through Guides to access all phrasebooks. Less than a month later, Lonely Planet updated Guides and removed access to the purchased content, while I was using it every day abroad.

My attempts to address the issue with LP have not gone anywhere. I would not recommend buying anything from LP’s app - they may take away the content you paid for without any warning (though they apparently keep your money). It’s hard not to see this as anything other than theft.

Update: Lonely Planet suggested in their response to this review that I contact them through Guides . I was already in contact with them through Guides before I wrote my review and was told to seek a refund from iTunes. (iTunes referred me to Lonely Planet for support.) Entirely unhelpful. I’d welcome some actual assistance from LP. They can make this right, but empty suggestions to contact them without any follow through is not how that is done.

Guides was previously my go to travel planner for new cities I was going to while backpacking and studying abroad. I used it in Western and Central Europe, China, and India and it had my back every time. The offline this app download and search and save functions were amazing and avoided expensive data usage. this app were well written with great recommendations and curated collections that would show you attractions off the beaten path. Enough cities were supported that you could find a guide for pretty much anywhere you go.

Sadly Lonely Planet must have realized how much money they could have been making and put everything behind a subscription paywall. It makes no sense to subscribe to a service you’ll only use specifically when traveling. Delete Guides and find another travel guide until that too inevitably disappears behind the impersonal face of a paywall.

Couldn’t be more annoyed by a once-beloved app. Imagine my shock when I discovered that Guides ’s this app are no longer free. After reading the replies to other reviews, all of which are identical for the most part, I am utterly disappointed overall. What a terrible way to alienate loyal readers.

If it is so costly to pay employees to write content for the this app, go right ahead and sell each individual city guide for a reasonable price...but who needs $40 worth of app information annually?! How many people take vacations to several different countries each year?! This was a horrible decision. Fewer this app to the most popular cities FREE was far, far preferable to thousands of this app at a stratospheric annual cost.

Guess I will go to the library instead from now on, since the Lonely Planet this app are FREE there. Or maybe I will just stick to using T.Adv. from now on. Devastated!

Guides is my favorite planning tool, very chic design, useful features, great information (as always from lonely planet). I like the vote for new cities feature too.

Would really like to see some kind of planning feature, maybe a way to add bookmarked things to an external calendar, or ideally have an internal planner just to connect dates and locations. Travel can be tough for places like Japan where you may be in three or four different regions throughout the trip so coordinating by the day would be great. You could then share and modify the plan and that would be great!

Still love it!!

This 👏 is 👏 not 👏 how 👏 you 👏 do 👏monetization 👏

Fire the person who came up with the monetization idea. Seriously. Fire him. He doesn’t care about the Lonely Planet brand, nor its users. He cares about making a name for himself and then hopping off elsewhere. Fire him and restore Guides to the way it was.

Original review: 4/5 stars

I really love Guides. Lonely planet has such great content and I constantly find myself going to places that are not filled with tourists but where locals actually hang out. There are excellent off the beaten path places and wonderful food options. For that I’m eternally grateful! The only complaint I have is for the map functionality - since I constantly struggle with data when I travel, I always download the offline map, and that’s when it gets tricky. Sometimes the map doesn’t respond until much later, sometimes it crashes Guides , and more frustrating is when it doesn’t tell me which direction I’m headed. I use this offline map called Planet Earth to supplement when I navigate offline which have worked out fine. But it would be so much better if the Lonely Planet app can nail that aspect too. Thank you for the hard work and I am a huge fan!

We used the Athens guide on a recent trip and it was a game changer. Being able to see nearby points of interest and read up on them on the go really helped us get the most out of our limited time in the city. Downloading more this app for our next trip.

For lodging and food, I still turn to TripAdvisor and Yelp as they are more up-to-date... but for sites Lonely Planet is the best!

For places where I haven’t started planning yet, this is a good starting point. Some city this app (e.g., Taipei) are much more thorough than others (e.g., Tokyo), so you shouldn’t just rely on this or else you can miss out on a high number of hidden and unhidden gems and you. The Lonely Planet countries this app can’t cover everything, so I find them to hurt more than help in trip planning, but the city this app in these apps can be a good tool. I particularly like bookmarking the points of interests I like and removing them as I travel. Too bad they don’t have a “visited” option instead so that I can use it to track all the places I have been using their app.

Lonely Planet has no regards for loyal customers. For context, Guides (currently in version 2) may meet your needs right now but Lonely Planet will not hesitate to pull a bait and switch.

Version 1 of Guides featured one time transactions that, supposedly, would grant unlimited access to phrasebooks and city this app (albeit only 275 cities). During the update to version 2 they removed this access FOR PEOPLE WHO HAD ALREADY PURCHASED IT. Worse still, the update was made no warning to users. The only release notes were that version 2 covered more cities, had a new home screen, and a new “immersive experience” for certain cities.

Version 2 of Guides may meet your needs today - Lonely Planet will be quick to point out it now covers 8,000 cities, which therefore requires them to use a subscription model. Regardless of whether or not that’s worth it, whatever features you purchase today may not be there tomorrow.

After this experience I’d highly encourage you to look elsewhere for travel this app and tools. These people clearly don’t care about treating their customers poorly.

Guides is fantastic for anyone planning for a trip or just winging it in a new city. It contains plenty of helpful information so you don’t need to lug your book around if you don’t want to. And Guides is a great companion with it!

My only grip is a tiny one. I wish there were a few tweaks to the UI. For instance, on the homepage searching for a city, if they had added the alphabet (sort of like that seen in the contacts tab) would be extremely helpful to find a city that your looking for.

Other than that, Guides is great for any traveler!

I absolutely love the LP app — it’s clear, concise, beautiful, and packed with info for travelers.

One thing, however, drives me insane: My lists of what I want to see in a place. Minor adjustments would make Guides incredibly more useful on the go.

1. Once I select the attractions I wanna see, please let me sort my list based on alphabetical, by neighborhood, or by themes.

2. Instead of adding and deleting things from my list, how about a “done” option with private notes and photos, so at the end of the day we really end up with a feeling of mission accomplished.

3. Use AI to see the sites I’ve added and suggest best routes for walking, driving, or ride pub transportation, tweeked for how much time i want to spend sightseeing. Suggest other top sites and viewpoints I may not have included on my original list.

Looking forward to seeing changes coming to Guides !

All th best
Solly

Loved using Guides the past few years as I planned out my trips. It was really helpful with navigating around a city and finding things to do. I get that they needed to find a way to get money for all the work they put into these this app, but this isn’t the way to do it. Packing everything under a one size fits all subscription model seems a bit obtuse. I’m not going to pay a monthly/yearly subscription for something I would use two weeks a year in a single city or two and could easily substitute with a google search. If they find a better way to monetize I’d be in, but this isn’t it no matter how many cities they add.

I love all the fantastic information Guides gives you about your destinations. I used it to plan a trip through New Orleans and we were able to find where to go, where not to go, and the good places to eat as well. I have been having some glitches with the website links not working to the tour or restaurant I was looking at, and it was a little annoying to have to go back to my browser and type it in, but really that’s my only complaint. A great app!