Homing in

By BRIAN JOHNSTON

So you're ready for the trip of a lifetime. You've got the best medical insurance and carefully considered what to pack in a small first-aid kit.

You've shopped around for the best ticket, stocked up on insect repellent and practised a few useful foreign-language phrases. You've only made one mistake: you hurried out to the bookshop and hastily bought a travel guide, thinking one would be as good as another.

Considering the preparation that goes into a holiday, it's surprising how little time and thought people give to their guidebooks. It's even more amazing when you consider that no other purchase will affect your holiday and enjoyment as much as those few hundred pages of practical information.

You can survive upset stomachs, mosquito bites and even language barriers, but a holiday taken with an unreliable or inappropriate guidebook can rapidly descend into farce - or nightmare.

To my mind, the most important rule when choosing a guidebook is to ask for specialist advice if possible. That means going to a travel bookshop if there's one near you, or at the very least to a major bookshop that has the widest possible selection of guides.

Specialist advice is always useful simply because of the sheer number and variety of titles being produced - there are nearly 30 guidebooks to Thailand alone and even more just on New York. A good bookshop ought to be able to point you in the direction of a guidebook that is best for you, rather than just offer you titles from the market leaders.

How many people have heard of Cicerone Press, which produces useful titles such as Selected Climbs in Northern Italy or Walking in the Dolomites? Who knows that, if you want to cross the Atlantic on a freight ship, then Freighter Travel Guide & Waterways of the World (Ford Guides) is the best bet?

In the average bookshop you would never come across obscure but excellent titles such as Michael Jacob's Madrid Observed (Pallas Athene), the laidback but informative K. Mark Stevens and George Wehrfritz's Southwest China off the Beaten Track (Passport Books) or the entertaining and quirky Scott Charles' All About Geneva (Georg). The latter, despite being produced by a small Swiss publisher, is one of the best guidebooks I've ever come across.

Remember too that market leaders cannot possibly be consistent in quality, even though they pack a lot of punch on the bookshop shelves.

Most people in the travel industry believe Lonely Planet is still the best for destinations in the Asia-Pacific region, Rough Guide for Europe, Cadogan for Europe and the Caribbean, and Let's Go and Fodor for North America. As a general rule, the closer the publishers are to home, the more reliable the guidebook.

Be specific. If you're about to have a holiday in Sicily Let's Go: Italy will offer about 30 pages of advice on the island - adequate enough for a short visit, perhaps, but hardly comparable to the 300-page Rough Guide: Sicily. It's always better to buy a regional guide whenever possible, since they not only contain more overall information but also have room for less-touristy destinations and activities.

You might well think you'll be back in another part of Italy at a later date - but you'll probably find your Italy guide is long out of date before that happens. Access and Time Out guides, which focus on cities, are excellent alternatives to the mainstream guidebook publishers if you're intending to take just a city break.

Be specific about subject matter too. Country guides may give a general picture for those on a standard holiday, but they're inadequate for spending any time in remoter regions. (Several fabulous national parks in Western Australia, for example, barely rate a paragraph in Lonely Planet: Australia.)

These days there's a proliferation of guides aimed at special activities or interests - everything from scuba diving to bird-spotting and archaeology.

Frommer has now started a For Kids series offering useful ideas to keep your children happy; Cadogan guides produce a series devoted to weddings and honeymoons. If that's the primary purpose of your trip then it's certainly worthwhile spending money on an in-depth guide.

This is another good reason why specialist advice can be helpful; it's one of the few ways you would ever come across a title such as Michael Mayfield and Rafael Gallo's The Rivers of Costa Rica: A Canoeing, Kayaking and Rafting Guide (Menasha Ridge Press), or R. J. Secor's Mexico's Volcanoes (Mountaineers Press) which offers route maps and information on climbing seven volcanic peaks.

The Wild series (published in Britain by Sheldrake) is invaluable for anyone wanting to do more than the standard tourist sights. Titles in the series include those covering Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey and Greece.

The Lazy Days series published by Cadogan is another delightful alternative to ordinary travel. If all you want on holiday is a little sightseeing, a long lunch and a short walk, these guides might be for you.

Don't get carried away, however: some guides are so detailed they become inadequate. Frommer's Paris by Night is specific enough - until you wake up next morning and wonder what you're going to do all day.

Lonely Planet's Trekking series has some fine information, but Trekking in Greece, for example, won't tell you anything about Athens, even though it's hard to conceive of visiting Greece, even for trekking, without at the very least passing through the city.

You should also take the style and content of the guidebook into account. If you mostly want practical information (transportation, accommodation, costs) then by all means seek out the highly readable Lonely Planet or Rough Guide books. You may find such guides short on background description and history, however.

At the other end of the spectrum, Blue Guide books are erudite tomes that go into details of history, art and archaeology, but they don't have much to say about where to sleep and eat. Blue Guide titles are ideal for someone on a pre-organised tour, perhaps, although they tend to be written in a rather heavy academic style.

More readable, but equally short on practical information, are Baedeker, Michelin and Companion guides. The Companion Guide to Venice is excellent; other titles cover South Africa, Greece, Spain and many regions of Italy, France and Britain. For a good balance of both cultural background and practical advice, Cadogan guides are hard to beat.

If it's a combination of information and photography you're looking for, then consider Insight Guide titles (APA Productions). I can't imagine actually travelling with these guides, but their stunning photography and colourful format can instruct you before you go, or serve as a great souvenir on your return.

The same could be said for the Eyewitness (Dorling Kindersley) and Everyman (Gallimard) series, which are now gaining ground in mainstream bookshops. Their glossy, photograph-filled formats are fun and attractive, but they're a little thin on practical information. They will, however, give you quirky insights into the architecture of a cathedral, the design of a gondola and much more.

Don't forget to consider yourself as well as the guidebook. Are you adventurous or cautious, sporty or culture-minded? Most importantly of all, perhaps, what is your budget?

Frommer and Fodor guides are generally upmarket and more than a trifle middle-aged. Lonely Planet, Let's Go and Rough Guide books are all primarily for those on a backpacker's budget and are targeted at independent travellers. (Although Lonely Planet has greatly widened its scope recently to include the better-heeled; witness Bermuda: A Travel Survival Kit.)

If you're going on a structured holiday that involves a great deal of sightseeing, however, they mightn't be the best guides for you. And remember that guidebooks in English are often written with either British or American travellers in mind - which do you feel more comfortable with?

In this respect Lonely Planet is certainly the most international, containing such information as visa requirements and exchange rates for New Zealanders as well as people from other backgrounds.

Having taken all this into consideration, you might well end up deciding that buying two guidebooks to the one region is worthwhile.

Guidebooks don't come cheap, but the cost will be only a fraction of the overall holiday budget. Your investment will certainly be repaid in terms of the information, time and money guidebooks save you.

But don't be a guidebook slave - a guidebook is a tool to help you on your way, never a substitute for your own impulses.