Thailand 14 (Lonely Planet) Paperback – February 1, 2012

Fantastic! I just read Secrets Of How to Live in Thailand For FREE and The Steps to Financial Freedom (Real Secrets Of How To Get Financial Freedom and Become a Wealth Magnet)) by Andrew Zirkin and decided to buy the Lonely Planet for Thailand to help me with my move. The pictures are great and I'm excited to see all the beautiful places described there. I hope I'll be able to travel a lot and make money online. I'm excited to finally get out of the rat race and experience a new and beautiful culture. Thanks so much for this great guide!!

A no-nonsense guide to the country. Given the size and range of destinations in Thailand it's hard to do everywhere justice but this proved a useful guide to take in Kindle format, The electronic edition could do with better navigation but the content was generally pretty accurate and useful

There's a reason you'll see a million other people in thailand carrying this book around, and that's probably because it's the best printed resource out there. I still definitely feel that TripAdvisor is a better resource overall, but having this book for sketching out itineraries and use during the trip is ideal. As others have mentioned, the map of bangkok isn't great so I'd find another one.

I used the hard copy of this guide during my first trip to Thailand. It was GREAT. I SO wish I hadn't traded it for the one I needed in China... but I digress.The main problem I see with the e-book version of this guide, is that it just doesn't work well. It's tough to navigate - even tough to know what's there. The tables of contents are intermittent and work differently from one another, and where the highlighted lists should have links to take you directly to different parts of the book describing those highlights, they are completely missing or incomplete. Some of the maps have English road names, some don't. And the ones with no English are worthless unless you read Thai. All the maps are difficult to read, and they way they open makes it difficult to find locations from the lists that refer to the maps. You have to close and open the map, then find the page with the landmark, then go back and open the map... tedious!In my opinion, an e-book that is this kind of guide should work like a web-site with consistent use of active links to different kinds of information throughout. I used book marks and the back button to jump around, but it was so clunky and difficult to use, I ended up even forgetting I had this guide on my phone.I have the Bali/ Lombok e-guide and it's MUCH better. I don't know about the structure of e-books, but if they had used one more like that one it would have been more useful to me.The information about places, landmarks, etc., was good and accurate as usual. Again, just difficult to navigate smoothly.I hope LP will work on the e-book version of this guide.

Lonely Planet has by far the most relevant, easy-to-use, and well edited travel guides for all countries. I wouldn't even think of using another brand of travel guide for independent travel. The Thailand guide is no exception, although I'd recommend buying the pdf versions, as this is a pretty thick book for one country. The book gives recommendations for housing, food, activities, highlights, etc. for every budget. The writers know the country in and out.

I don't know why this is allegedly the most popular guidebook to Thailand. It's organized pretty haphazardly (for example, what would be interesting stories--on ladyboys, elephants, etc) are randomly inserted on pages that need filler. I stumbled on some of these at the end of our trip because they were in some random section.Quite a few places we walked by--especially in Chiang Mai--had "Recommended by Lonely Planet" signs out front and looked like havens for douchebag "farang".Most of the places we stayed, and some of our favorite parts of the trip weren't included in the book at all (May Kaidee's vegetarian cooking school in Chiang Mai and Bangkok is the best example; Mae Hwang village outside of Chiang Mai which had a sizeable amount of Westerners passing through on their way to jungle/elephant treks; Spicy Villa there; also Centara hotel in Chiang Mai, Anantara Lawanna in Koh Samui). This all makes me wonder how well they do their homework.Also very short on information about Thailand itself. In a culture that is strongly based on a shared religion (as the book itself states), they devote just a couple of paragraphs to discussing Buddhism. Very little on their art, which was completely disappointing, as it's the basis for the wats.Quite a few factual inaccuracies also--most notably, that you're forbidden from photographing Buddha. Not true. None of the temples posted this "prohibition", and when we asked, Thais were incredulous that we were told this. There are some rules for how to photograph Buddha (never place yourself or another human higher in the picture frame etc), and it would have been helpful to have included this instead.Had a bit of a shock also when they referred to ladyboys as "well-endowed dudes" on page 133. This homophobic Western slang would never be accepted in Thailand, and ladyboys and Thais consider them females--and refer to them as such. Another example of frat-boy mentality which we didn't appreciate.We had a few incidents with wildlife--sea urchin sting, and a fire ant bite. Having them in the book wouldn't have prevented this from happening of course, but it might have been useful information.Overall, by the end of the trip, we deemed this book useless. We deliberately chose LP because we're young, and wanted an adventurous trip with recommendations a little off the beaten path and fun. Eyewitness guides or Rough Guides from now on; LP sucks.