Travel Guides: Essential or Dead Weight?

I love a good travel guide. Packed full of useful information for any trip I might fancy making. But in an age where all the information you could possibly need is available with one click on the internet, are they really essential or are they just dead weight?

Well, let's go through the cons first. You have to pay for them and if you like to buy them new, you can end up forking out quite a bit - anything in the range of £20 for the weightier ones like my Lonely Planet guide to Australia. Ugh.

Of course, you could hop on over the internet and find almost the same info for free - there's so many tourist information sites nowadays you're spoilt for choice. Plus with the vast array of review sites (TripAdvisor, I'm looking at you), do you really need the recommendations of a few travel authors?

Then there's the weight. If you want that information with you when you travel, lugging even one book about can be a pain. I took my guide with me to New Zealand and I hardly even looked at it the entire time we were there, so was it really worth having that extra weight in my bag?

And finally, there's the range. You can only fit so much information into a book so obviously the authors are going to pick and choose what goes in and what doesn't. Maybe there's an amazing out of the way hidden gem that didn't make the cut for some reason. Just relying on the guides, you'd miss out.

But what about their plus points? Well, the first is that they're written by people who (generally) know what they're looking for. These are people who have travelled all over and know how to ferret out those slightly out of the way places that you'd otherwise miss. Sure, you'll find loads of others on the web, but the guides can be a good starting point.

The second and possibly my favourite part about them is the inspiration factor. Just as a good novel can transport you to other worlds, so can the best travel guides. You can explore a country from your armchair. Plus you might get new ideas as to where you want to go. When I started looking at Cambodia I was only really interested in going to Angkor Wat and a quick internet search for things to do in Cambodia will agree that Angkor Wat is the number one. But my travel guide for the country pointed me in the direction of the east of the country with its rivers and forest and now I'm thinking of extending my trip to take those in too.

Basically, no, travel guides aren't essential and if you insist on taking them away with you, you'll probably find them to be dead weight. But as a starting point for your plans or even if you're just interested in a country they're an invaluable resource. I wouldn't be without my collection and it's still growing.

What do you think? Is it really worth spending money on a book that won't even give you half the information the internet can?