<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Tell All Guide
Review: I enjoy all of TimeOut's city guides. I have never been disappointed with any of the suggested hotels. I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO EVERYONE and I never leave home without one. As long as I have my TimeOut book, I'm always sure to have a great time
Rating:
Summary: You're going to LOVE FRANCE!
Review: I've made >20 visits to France all together. Here are my reviews of the best guides....to meet you r exact needs.....I hope these are helpful and that you have a great visit! I always gauge the quality of my visit by how much I remember a year later......this review is designed to help you get the guide that will be sure YOU remember your trip many years into the future. Travel Safe and enjoy yourself to the max!
Time Out
The Time Out guides are very good. Easy reading, short reviews of restaurants, hotels, and other sites, with good public transport maps that go beyond the city centre. Many people who buy more than one guidebook end up liking this one best!
Let's Go
Let's Go is a great guide series that specializes in the niche interest details that turn a trip into a great and memorable experience. Started by and for college students, these guides are famous for the details provided by people who used the book the previous year. They continue to focus on providing a great experience inexpensively. If you want to know about the top restaurants, this is not for you (use Fodor's or Michelin). Let's Go does have a bewildering array of different guides though. Here's which is what:
Budget Guide is the main guide with incredibly detailed information and reviews on everything you can think of.
City Guide is just as intense but restricted to the single city.
PocketGuide is even smaller and features condensed information
MapGuide's are very good maps with public transportation and some other information (like museum hours, etc.)
Michelin
Famous for their quality reviews, the Red Michelin Guides are for hotels & Restaurants, the Green Michelin Guides are for main tourist destinations. However, the English language Green guide is the one most people use and it has now been supplemented with hotel and restaurant information. These are the serious review guides as the famous Michelin ratings are issued via these books.
Fodor's
Fodor's is the best selling guide among Americans. They have a bewildering array of different guides. Here's which is what:
The Gold Guide is the main book with good reviews of everything and lots of tours, walks, and just about everything else you could think of. It's not called the Gold guide for nothing though....it assumes you have money and are willing to spend it.
SeeIt! is a concise guide that extracts the most popular items from the Gold Guide
PocketGuide is designed for a quick first visit
UpCLOSE for independent travel that is cheap and well thought out
CityPack is a plastic pocket map with some guide information
Exploring is for cultural interests, lots of photos and designed to supplement the Gold guide
MapGuide
MapGuide is very easy to use and has the best location information for hotels, tourist attractions, museums, churches etc. that they manage to keep fairly up to date. It's great for teaching you how to use the Metro. The text sections are quick overviews, not reviews, but the strong suite here is brevity, not depth. I strongly recommend this for your first few times learning your way around the classic tourist sites and experiences. MapGuide is excellent as long as you are staying pretty much in the center of the city.
Blue Guides
Without doubt, the best of the walks guides.... the Blue Guide has been around since 1918 and has extremely well designed walks with lots of unique little side stops to hit on just about any interest you have. If you want to pick up the feel of the city, this is the best book to do that for you. This is one that you end up packing on your 10th trip, by which time it is well worn.
Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet has City and Out To Eat Guides. They are all about the experience so they focus on doing, being, getting there, and this means they have the best detailed information, including both inexpensive and really spectacular restaurants and hotels, out-of-the-way places, weird things to see and do, the list is endless.
Rating: 
Summary: lots of sizzle and good info., but poorly organized
Review: Just returned from a trip to Europe and used this guidebook while in Paris. I usually go with Rough Guide's city guide books when I travel because I like how they break down the city in an area-by-area fashion. But I decided to try TimeOut's Paris guide book -- liked all the magazine-like layout and color pictures, history section, and other little layout info. nuggets (like Hemingway's favorite spots in town). There's a ton of good info. in here like:
* excellent color maps in back (I didn't need to buy a streetmap when in Paris since it has all the major parts of the city covered).
* great concise info about attractions/restaurants/clubs/etc. with a pointer to the maps in back for location (loved this feature -- great time saver and prevents you from asking for directions).
* general tips on language, currency, pitfalls of Paris (like pickpockets! This little section could save you a lot of headaches -- the Algerian kids are real and they work just as described in here! I saw two kids at work in the Anver's Metro stop near Sacre-Coeur, but I digress....)
* the Trips Out of Town section was useful, but could use more precise information about what trains to take out to certain places like Chartes. My major critcism of "TimeOut Paris" is the way the information is organized by these sections: Context (history); Sightseeing; Eat, Drink, Shop; Arts & Entertainment; and Directory (a vauge description that doesn't really get at what that section of the book is about). Instead of tackling each section of Paris and addressing these topics by city section, you have to search around the book for info., and that's a huge waste of time. Lastly, as another reviewer already pointed out, check out Sandra Gustafson's Great Sleeps/Eats series and read them BEFORE you book and go on your trip. The accommodation and restaurant listings are skimpy in here. I also found TimeOut's restaurant recommendations hit-and-miss: I tried a Thai place recommended that was within walking distance of my hotel and was disappointed (great hip ambiance and people watching, poor service and skimpy portions), while another brasserie recommended in Monmartre was completely wonderful in every way. The bottomline is that no single guide book will satisfy you on every level, but be sure to supplement this book with others as well as research on the Internet (check out Lonely Planet's web site and message boards). Happy travels.
Rating: 
Summary: Lost in Paris with a Time Out guide..
Review: The Time Out Guide to Paris has to be just about the worst guide I have read.
The maps are worse than useless and are impossible to read. The guide book itself extreemly bulky and heavy to carry, and it is illogically ordered so that you can never find the information that you need.Not to mention the fact that the text is written almost incomprehensibly, as if a person of certain years is trying to write through the potential eyes of a 15 year old. It fails and makes the whole book unreadable and uninteresting.
The hotel suggestions are entirely useless, as they fail to mention that some areas of town are perhaps not such a good idea to stay in if you are on your own, female or with young children and the list is far from exhaustive.
I will stick to Rough Guides in future as I have yet to be let down by them, and I never feel that I am on my own in a strange city with one in my pocket. Not so with a Time Out however, as I have been lost so many times and missed out on so many interesting sites and events that I have been forced to buy a Rough Guide and a map of the city and the Metro.
Rating:
Summary: great guide to take along
Review: This guidebook is fun to read and very informative. It starts with a summary of Parisian history, then sections on each neighborhood, then sections by subject: accommodation, restaurants, sights, clubs, practical information. Good color maps are in the back of the book with a good index and street map index. I used it as my one guidebook for my vacation. This book seems more up-to-date than the Lonely Planet guide to Paris, although it's not as frank. However, I found the accommodation and restaurant listings snobbish and skimpy (use the Cheap Sleeps and Cheap Eats books instead). Overall, it's a great book to tote on the trip, but the Lonely Planet and Cheap Sleeps & Eats are the best for pre-trip research.
<< 1 >>
| 
