Travel Guides - What's Best

I love the Rough Guides, they put out some good stuff. Lots of practical info, also for the less-than-prosperous traveller, but also balanced out by surprisingly good history / society background.

I like their background stuff because it often includes some telling anecdotes and off-standard details and focuses a lot on 20th century background as well, so that the texts escape the dreary chronological enumerations that characterise much of the traditional travel guides. Like, a standard guide will tell you when and how the Matyas Church was built in Budapest; the Rough Guide will also point you to the street where in '56 a flash point of insurrectional fighting flared up, and why.

Lonely Planet they say is good, but somehow there's something in their format and lay-out that make their guides rather clunky in use to my taste; it also seems to have more of the standard kind of summaries. Thats just a personal impression tho.

When I first started travelling I used the Lets Go guides like everyone, for all the cheap places they listed and so on. But the background they provide is really superficial and they seem to kinda go for all the obvious backpacker/hippie kid places.

What about the ... on a Shoestring guidebooks? Pretty much the same set-up I think, how do they compare?

If you're going to some Central or East European city, dont forget to pick up your cheap In Your Pocket city guide to get a surprisingly up-to-date listing of all the cool cafes/restaurants/clubs to go to ...

Hello, Galilite. You're planning on being a tourist, right? So don't be so hard on tourist traps. They're only there to serve you. How "native" do you want to go, anyway?

Personally, I think it's best to find a guide that is as specific as possible to the place you want to visit. I like Scotland and think the Undiscovered Scotland information is great. I check every guide I can find so I know where most people seem to be headed and can decide for myself if it is worth fighting the crowds for some special destination.

Google is a good place to start searching, looking for "country+tourism" for example, as well as specific towns or tourist sites. Look for Google images and news.

As you start searching, keep a list of interesting things and search for those. It can be helpful to look at the local news. It's also very good to cross-check places you're interested in and see what the competition is. I also check weather reports.

If you study individual B&B, hotel and other accommodation websites, they'll often have good maps and more up-to-date information for the traveller. They often list all the best places to see in their area. I think that it is Travelocity (though maybe it's Expedia) that has listings for places that include personal experiences.

Mobil used to put out some good/cheap regional travel guides for US, Canada. I don't know if they still do?

I don't travel very often but do so very enthusiastically when I do. I buy many guides, especially the less popular ones that may have more cultural information in them, about the place I am going to. I used to like Penguin Travel Guides, for example. I look in used book stores first, or a website such as Amazon, under travel guides, and would choose used copies. I get them home and pore over them, working out a sense of where in that country I want to go and which guide had the most interesting information. I literally tear the guides apart, because they are heavy and I like to travel quite lightly. So the last time I went to italy, a trip that involved 13 cities, I had torn out pages from various guide books, stapled together and all totalling in thickness perhaps a 1/10, or less, of a guide book in weight.

On that trip, since it was 29 days for 13 places, I chose all the hotels but one beforehand and called for reservations. I choose quite low priced but charming places, and the expense of the calls and buying the guide books has been worth it. (On other trips, I only find a hotel for the first location after I get off the plane. I've had a lot of luck by going to the Tourist Information center in the city and having them find me a place. Also, I usually don't run around from place to place as much on that trip, which was a photo taking trip to catch specific places.) I guess I should explain that I am middle aged and not particular interested in staying in hostels - I am into serenity, or my sense of it, after I have walked miles in a new city.

When I made that trip in early 1999, I wasn't as attuned to the computer and google; if I did that trip again now I would probably do some of that searching online. By the way, Fodor's, etc. have online travel help sites. But I would still do the guidebook search.

Finally, if a guide book is both small and really interesting to me, say Salvadori's Architecture of Rome, I'll pack it.

Since you seem to be an English speaker,e Rick Steves is great for European travel...

http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/links/home.htm

It's also helpful to check various travel services and piggy-back on their itinerary choices. One option is Elderhostel which provides hundreds of world-wide edu-travel choices. Looking up their offerings may give you a better picture of what's important culturally, geographically, etc. as well as good accomodations.

I'm a fan of the Rough Guides approach.

Regarding that that the just-this-moment-published-guide has only last years data ...

At least, 'in-pubs/cafés/discotheks' may well have changed ... as well as entrance prices :wink:

In France, I usuall use the Michelin and buy later some regional stuff at the place additionally.
For other countries, I try to get guides written in that country/by authors from that country ... and buy local ones there well.

(When I was young/younger, I used only used a German guide - origianally only by Martin Vellbinger, later by others as well [addited some stuff, too ]: personal experiences from "the hitch-hike generation" [the hotel tips were worth the money for the books!])

Rough Guide info is in my compilation too...

And I am not all that interested in disco entry pricing, heh. I am asleep then. I am interested in hotel information as for some reason I love staying in a place I like. I know, I know, I am there so little time, but it is part of my pleasure. What I like might be on almost any range of room pricing, but my eyes light up if there is a garden mentioned, or I like the picture.. my first hotel in Rome was a one star in Fodor that I picked because it was sort of close to the Colosseum (ha! it wasn't so close but it looked like it on the map) and within the three lines of print was the word garden. It's still one of my great favorite places, though at three star level now. Thus, I like those guides with titles like "charming small hotels in..." I don't tear those up though, they're keepers.

Wow! You people are professionals, aren't you?

That's very surprising, I thought everybody would pick Lonely Planet.

Piffka - I'm browsing around for now... been a tourist for a while. And thanks for the compliment, but I'm not a native English speaker.

So in addition to those I listed we have for now:
* Lonely Planet ... On a Shoestring (can't be very different from the mainstream series, right?)
* In your pocket (went to their website, found a cute feature: free PDFs, but the selection is a little small)
* Lets Go
* Mobil
* Penguin
* Rick Steves
* Michelin (do they have English versions?)
* Martin Vellbinger (also, is there English version available?)
* country-specific guides

I also found a website listing guides by country and fished more:
* AAA (it claims to be "the most trusted name in travel"... anyone heard of it ?)
* Access
* Blue Guide
* National Geographic
* Passport

I mostly want those for off-the-beaten-track tips, short phrasebook and maps. Discos and cafes pricing is not really an issue.

I went to Beijing a couple of months ago with Lonely Planet and Fodor's. Lonely Planet had Chinese translation near every name; I could literally point and it always got me where I needed. Fodor's missed it and its maps were harder to navigate. This made a difference for me . The hotel I stayed in was very good, but it wasn't listed in neither of the guides.

Oh, and ossobuco - Lonely Planet has extra-strength binding or whatever they call it, so you might want to skip it .

Michelin runs a couple of English guide, both those in green as in red.

Velbinger is only in German.

What I meant when talking about regional/local guides, Galilite, are those, you get e.g. in churches, castles and (perhaps) tourist offices: mostly in English as well, and all with more information than any 'normal' travel guide could give.

I have a nice red michelin guide for italy, actually I think it is in italian, but that is ok with me, I read it though I speak poorly. It is dense with info. That's one I wouldn't tear up either.

Add Charming Small Hotel guides to your list, eh?
Also, Richard Saul Wurman's Access Guides. I also like those a lot, and they are unique in format. They have something of an orthagonal view of a neighborhood, and callouts with numbers for the different buildings seen from overhead; these correlated with what is interesting in them, and there is a lot that is interesting. Ah, they're another group I wouldn't tear up - they're quite thin and info filled.

Re: Travel Guides - What's Best


this........

And no one's mentioned the Cadogan Guides yet...

but now :wink:

Re: Travel Guides - What's Best
National Geographic? These guys are more into photography, right?

But also streetmaps.

Wow! They even got my hometown.

It's a dot though, as always .

I usually don't bring a guide with me- I prefer little discoveries on my own-, but when I do, I always prefer 'Rough guides,' for the reasonings that Nimh has given. Not many other guides would give huge guides to literature and film history. It's as if the people there don't care how many pages are 'essential.' As I tend to skip tourist attractions, I like a book that gives detail about places really off the beaten track; RGs do that.