Luke Driscell, 21, spent a month last year in Costa Rica through The University of Memphis' study abroad program to use his Spanish from his Spanish major.
He began the trip without a guidebook, but said he looked at someone's "Lonely Planet: Latin America" on a Shoestring when he arrived and picked one up.
"What I look for in a travel guide is something that helps me find things on a local level, not as a tourist," Driscell said. "I'm looking for places where you'll meet the people and experience the culture."
Driscell said he only used the one guide for everything he needed, and he said he really liked the fact that it was made for the traveler on a slim budget.
"It led me to this great place where you go deep sea fishing and pick out your fish -- they grill it right in front of you and you picnic on the beach under a thatched roof," Driscell said. That's the kind of thing I was looking for.
Driscell plans to go to Japan after graduating next year if all works out well, and said he plans to use the "Lonely Planet" series again for that trip.
Jen Durham just graduated from The U of M with a bachelor's degree in foreign languages and is currently in Denver as part of a trip around the United States.
She said that when it comes to travel planning, she doesn't like to do much planning for fear of following the beaten path.
"Honestly, I'm pretty unorganized," Durham said, adding that she has always just bought a "Let's Go!" travel guide at the last minute.
"If it's already in the book then it's already touristy. I usually use it as a base and from there ask the people what to see and do," Durham said.
Durham said she mostly used the "Let's Go!" guide for its budget tips, lists of places to stay, where to avoid, prices, and good directions to those places.
"The Internet is always a good place to look because you get a wide variety of opinions and it's free, whereas you have to expect to pay around $20 for a travel book," Durham said.
April Gardner, 21, geography major, has traveled to Belize and Mexico and used both local Internet sites and the "Lonely Planet" guides for her trip.
"I like to do a lot of adventure travel, and I just figured their local sites would be the safest place to figure out where to go," Gardner said.
Gardner said she chose the "Lonely Planet" guide because she had seen the "Lonely Planet" television show and figured that the travel guides would be good, because they had "people in the field actually filming."
However, Gardner said she barely used the guide at all.
"I'd look up stuff on the Internet and then see if it matched what was in the book and they usually did. The guide was just something in my hand to actually hold," Gardner said.
Gardner said she traveled to Belize in the summer on her own for two and a half weeks, and then went for fall break and ended up staying over the vacation time. She returned again for Christmas break and is thinking about possibly traveling to Ecuador using the same planning method as she used for her earlier trips.
