Access Paris, 8th Edition

Rating:
Summary: An excellent guide to Paris.
Review: Access Paris provides excellent descriptions for shopping, eating, walking and attractions. This guide is especially helpful if you are lucky enough to spend more than a few days in Paris. Each description tells you what you want to know and how to get there. I would recommend this book in conjunction with Frommer's to plan a daily itinerary that will make everyone in your travel group happy.

Rating:
Summary: excellent guide to enjoying Paris
Review: Better for pre-trip planning, you can sit in bed at night reading the insightful, almost personal descriptions of the restaurants, shops, galleries, hotels, parks, and markets that make up Paris. Seperated in the book by geographic areas, reading along is like walking along the streets, giving you an opportuinty to think ahead of time of some of the places you might want to explore or experience. Good information on hotels, descriptions that give you a feel for the places.
Quirky because, although you can find a great jazz club with hours open from 10pm to 3am in this guide, it won't tell you what time the Louvre or the Effiel Tower closes. The guide will give an acceptable descripton of a tourist attraction, then segue into a description of the bookstore, the cafeteria, the park next door without ever mentioning when might be a good time to visit along with the other tourists.
I enjoyed refering to it in the months before the trip.

Rating:
Summary: Use this Guide in Paris!
Review: Excellent restaurant reviews and fascinating tidbits about sites (Ex. if Napoleon hadn't changed his mind in the nick of time, Parisians would be staring at a 160 ft elephant squirting water from its trunk instead of the L'Arc de Triompe). But if you are planning to use the Metro (subway) for getting around, you'll need another book. The Metro map on the back cover is so small that even a person with 20/20 vision will need a magnifying glass. Also, the street maps do not show the metro stops. I'd recommend Eyewitness Paris for metro info.

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Summary: Errors and omissions cost us time, money, enjoyment.
Review: It is hard to believe a seventh edition would be so flawed. Another reviewer mentioned missing or wrong museum hours--the only hours mentioned for either d'Orsay or the Louvre are 10AM to 9:30 PM, but we had been at the d'Orsay for only a half hour on a Friday when we were told the museum closes at 5:30. Another reviwer mentioned the difficulty of finding restaurants in the book--it is indexed not by cuisine or by location, but by star rating! So, to find a restaurantin the index, one must wade through four separate lists--one for each of the ratings. Normally I love Access guides. Their strength is complete and accurate maps of each section of a city with restaurants and shops and points of interest shown on each local map, but that is a weakness in the Paris guide since key restaurants are not shown on the map or listed in the section where they are located. For instance, when I was in Montparnasse and looking for Le Dome restaurant, I could not find it on either the map or the listings for that section of the city. I did find it later, by accident, but neither in the index nor in the Montparnasse section of the book. While reading about "Le Dome Bastille" in the Les Halles section of the book, I found at the end of that restaurant description that "The famous Le Dome in Montparnasse is this bistro's 'maison mere'." This was not the only famous restaurant omitted from the map and section of the book devoted to its location, but then mentioned as an aside in a listing for another restaurant in another section of the city. Other omissions are the admission prices for the various museums. Other guide books point one toward the "Carte Musee" which offers admission to 70 museums, but it is not listed in the index to this book. One does find it in the orientation section of the book, but it does not tell which museums are covered, what the price is, or whether it makes sense for a particular traveler to buy the "Carte" or to pay individual admissions. Why buy a guide book if one has to visit the museums to learn the hours or the admission? Others have mentioned errors in the guide to the metro as well--we found the train recommended to the palace at Versailles leaves one at a station nearly a mile walk away whereas the train they should have but did not recommend lands one a block from the palace. Suffice it to say we eventually learned to turn to other guides. "Cheap Eats in Paris" was easier to use and gave us better restaurants at much cheaper prices. Knopf's Paris guide, though five years old, had all the information on museum hours, prices, metro, etc. that Access either has wrong or doesn't include at all. Given our prior reliance on Access guides, this experience left us surprised, disappointed, and frustrated at the lost time and money from the inadequate and erroneous information.

Rating:
Summary: The most useful of guides
Review: This book is great for planning and dreaming, but it's an absolute must-have when you're THERE. I love this (and all the Access guides I've used) more than any other books I've tried to use in European cities, and not merely because their first-rate graphic design is clean and modern and their reviews are extremely reliable. The true test of their quality is this: they're lightweight, compact, and extremely easy to use when you're walking around the city. The map/number system works beautifully, not just to help you find particular things, but to use for landmarking when you're starting to feel a little lost. Another very helpful feature are the lists of "favorite places" and "things-to-do" lists of local frequent visitors to this most beautiful but complex of cities. The lists lead you to the coolest restaurants, sights, and those out-of-the-way places that make you feel less a tourist and more a traveler.

Rating:
Summary: excellent guide to enjoying Paris
Review: We recently took this and two other guide books to Paris, and as another reviewer said, we did not even bother to carry the others with us after the first day. The guide is excellent for seeing the city on foot and attempting to experience the essence of the many different quarters. If you're looking for "the best of Paris in 2-3 days" you might look elsewhere. This book leaves it to you to decide what you feel is important to see (because there is just that much) and gives information according to location. A map is at the beginning of each section with numbers corresponding to all the things listed to see, do, eat and buy in that area. While restaurants are not listed by ethnicity, it never took us long to locate the kind of restaurant we were looking for in the book. In addition, each section contains a good introduction to the history of the quarter and the essence one should try to get from it.
My only complaint is that the street maps do not point out Metro stops, and we sometimes had to do guess work to calculate our routes after exiting the Metro. (though there is a convenient Metro plan inside the back cover)

Rating:
Summary: Use this Guide in Paris!
Review: You will not be disappointed if this is the only guidebook you take to Paris. My husband and I, neither of whom speak French, took Michelin, Frommers, and this Access guide with us on our honeymoon in Paris. After the first day, we put all the other books back in the suitcase and relied on this book. The restaurant ratings are accurate both for price and quality. The color codings (red for restaurants, blue for hotels, black for history) make it easy to use on the fly. The maps are great as well.