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The $20 Investment for Your $3,000 Trip
Everything you always wanted to know about travel guidebooks by a professional travel writer who spent a decade writing them
Your guidebook is one of your closest travel allies, your pocket-sized friend with all the answers and the best insider's advice—and I felt this way even before I started writing the things.
Your guidebook is the one item in your pack that can tell you which bus will go to the castle outside town, which hidden bistro has the best local food, and which hotels accept Visa or give discounts to families.
It can provide the background on that fresco in the cathedral, instructions for using the local subway, and exact prices for triple rooms and prix-fixe menus to help you watch that travel dollar. It will direct you to the best shopping, the hottest discos, and the museums most worth your time and money.
People who travel without guidebooks usually regret it and end up buying one on the road (which, with the exception of any locally-produced guides, will be imported and hence far more expensive).
With so many series and specialty books, the travel shelf can be a confusing place; it's hard to tell which book may be right for you. Make sure you choose a guidebook that fits your personality, budget, and travel style. Guides that cover all of Europe are great for planning and for whirlwind vacations, but for more focused trips you may also want a country, regional, or city guide.
We'll get more into the style and focus of each guide in a minute, but first, a few rules of thumb
The main rule
| Disclaimers |
| Two disclaimers right off the bat. (1) Except on rare occasions, since 2005 I no longer write print travel guides; just this site. (2) Even when I did write guidebooks, I never received a single penny in royalties on any of my books—that's the percentage of each sale that an author would normally receive in most parts of the publishing industry; however, that is not how most guidebook publishers operate these days. What I mean to say is that I neither have, nor have ever had, a vested interest in anyone buying these things. But I did work hard on them, and thought they were pretty good, and it was nice to see folks carrying them around. |
The main rule when shopping around for one of these handy dandy travel companions is: don't skimp on your guidebooks . Buy two or three. Get books that balance each other out. One may have great hotels and restaurants, another is packed with background and historical info for sightseeing, a third has all sorts of fun recommendations for things to see and do beyond the touristy stuff.
Ignore the Price Tag
One mistake I see many people making in the bookstores—and I hang around the travel section an unhealthy amount —is buying a guide based on the cover price. Chances are, you're banking a trip worth several thousand dollars and a lot of happiness on the information in two or three books, so you want to get the best advice possible.
Don't even look at the price when choosing a guide. I'll tell you right now: the most expensive books are the $29.95 visually oriented books on glossy paper with lots of pictures. Most hover around $15 to $20—that's peanuts to your vacation expense account.
Two or three high-quality guides are the best vacation investment you can make, and they will pay for themselves a hundred times over. One of my favorite letters from a reader thanked me for saving them $450 in plane fares and car rental fees just with the advice in the planning chapter.
Check that expiration date
Keep in mind that these things take around six months or longer to research and write, plus another six months to go through the editorial, printing, and distribution to your local book store processes. That means the information in those pages is probably at least a year old.
In the interim, things will have changed somewhat. Restaurants do sometimes close down, hotels always raise their prices, the tourist office may have decided to move across town, some great new museum may have opened, and ferry schedules will undoubtedly have changed.
Furthermore, since the book stays on the shelf for at minimum one year (often two years, sometimes even three), that means the info in the copy you pick up may be getting very old indeed. The copyright date printed on the page with all that fine print near the very front of the book (in British-published books, sometimes it's at the back), is a good guide, but it only tells you which year (in rare cases down to the month) the book actually hit the store shelves.
So cut your guide a little bit of slack when its info proves a little stale, and please stop insisting to hotel owners that they are somehow law-bound to charge the rates printed in your dog-eared 1996 edition of Let's Go (hoteliers complain about this to me all the time). In the end, even if all prices are $2 to $20 higher than the book states, for the most part they'll still be relatively on the mark.
The budget hotels will still be the cheapest, and the luxury ones will be the splurges. Though, again, sometimes a run-down one-star flophouse will, between the research phase and the time you buy the book, have acquired new owners and been renovated into a mid-scale three-star inn.
I solve this problem by making one last run to the bookstore travel section just before leaving on a trip, hoping to find a brand-new edition of each of the books I've already bought for my trip (happens more often than you'd think).
If there is a new one, I bite the bullet, spend the extra $20, buy the new edition and toss the old one—even if I had bought that older edition just a few weeks before. Remember, this is an investment in a tool that has the potential to save you hundreds of dollars on your trip. Twenty bucks is chicken scratch.
Frankenstein your guides
I always get several guides to each destination, then ruthlessly rip them up and staple together related sections—say, every book's chapter on Paris—to make my own Frankensteinian guide to each city. This is what I stick in my daypack to carry around town, rather than lugging about a stack of massive books.
When I leave town, I either keep the sections as souvenirs, pass them along to a new arrival, or toss them onto the exchange bookshelf at the hotel. Share the love, baby. Share the love.
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This article was last updated in October 2006. All information was accurate at the time.
Copyright © 1998–2010 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
