Tonga & Samoa not Enough?

Just noticed that after eliminating the separate Samoa and Tonga guides and putting a much-reduced coverage of them together in one book for a while, Lp has now reduced their coverage further, and squeezed the Cooks into the same book, too:

http://shop.lonelyplanet.com/pacific/rarotonga-samoa-tonga-7/

Quite a funny combination considering that there is not even a reasonable air link between the Cooks and western Polynesia! If anything, perhaps Tokelau would have been more rightfully thrown into the mix, while the Cooks would have been better joined with Tahiti, to which they are (ASFAIK) directly linked by air, too.

There's probably a close correlation between the annual visitor count and the money spent on visitor guides to any particular destination. With the bean counters making the call you can expect obtuse destination match-ups in a guide covering multiple countries.

Accountants oughta get out more often :-)

And then you have a guide for "Rarotonga AND the Cook Islands." Now I'll bet that one's from the marketing department.

They have one to "Tahiti & French Polynesia", too. ;-)
Obviously they just need to put the most catchy name on the cover.

Incidentally, it seems that the Cooks now take up most space in the book, with 56 pages.
Samoa & Tonga have been reduced to 45 and 43 pages.
In fact, the page count for each is now basically exactly the same as in the general South Pacific guide, so we can say that LP no longer covers these 3 places separately, simply cut out their brief coverage from the regional guide to sell it separately, too.

Typical - having to buy a book when two-thirds of it are irrelevant. I downloaded the relevant chapters from the last PNG/Solomons guide, and would advise others to do the same for Cooks,Tonga or Samoa.