Eye it up before you go- Eyewitness Travel Guides (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

Member Name: waterlilly

Product:	Eyewitness Travel Guides
Date:	10/06/09 (14 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Organised, compact, great detail and fabulous photos

Disadvantages: Not available for every location

With so many options out there for the traveller it can be hard to choose a travel guide. You'll find some people swear by Rough Guide, Lonely Planet or Time Out but I swear by DK Eyewitness Travel Guide. The first one I ever bought was in Rome and I fell in love with them then and there. There are several options as Eyewitness do large versions of their city and country guides as well as smaller top ten and pocket map & guides. I currently own Eyewitness guides for Austria, Italy, Greece, London, Paris, Rome, Dublin, Munich and Barcelona. I have Top 10 Guides for Florence and Barcelona as well as pocket guides for Toronto, Vienna and Dublin.

Organisation is essential in a travel guide and Eyewitness guides are highly intuitive. Countries and cities are broken into regions to help you quickly find the right location for you. The city guides have great road maps for each section eliminating the need to carry extra maps. Points of interest are indicated and explained (it helps to know why you might want to go see something). I found it particularly useful that the guide includes floorplans of important museums such as the Vatican museum in the Rome guide or St. Paul's Cathedral in the London guide.

However, what really makes the Eyewitness guides stand out is their use of photography and images. Their photographs are stunning as well as informative. I have to admit to purchasing guides for cities I have travelled to previously because they make such great keepsakes. You might ask why photos are so helpful? Well imagine standing in Dublin's Temple Bar looking for a specific famous pub. Now imagine that you have a photograph of the pub in front of you and BINGO! Easy to spot from down the street. If a guide tells you that a not-to-miss statue by Berini is found in a courtyard it can be really useful to know what you're looking for, particularly if you slept through art history. Friends and I were standing on the pavement in Rome watching a bunch of people heading into what looked like a rather boring church. Flipping open the book to the section of town we knew we were in revealed a photo of the church we were looking at and told us it housed the Mouth of Truth made famous in Roman Holiday.

The guides sections on Traveler's Needs and Survival Guide are also enhanced using photographs. You can learn to identify money, signs for public transport, pharmacies and the police station before leaving home. You can also figure out which bottles of local wine or beer to aim for in grocery stores and what souvenirs are the best examples of the region.

Slight downsides to the guide are that the full sized guides can get a little heavy, particularly the ones for an entire country. I've found in general that the city specific guides are a lot more useful on the ground. If you're standing in Rome you'd rather have the Rome guide than the Italy one. Also the recommended places to stay and eat can be a little pricey and can sometimes be a little touristy. However, my biggest complaint is that there isn't an eyewitness guide for everywhere in the world yet. For our honeymoon in Malta my husband had to buy a different type of guide after apologising to me profusely.

Summary: Use it to plan, helps you get around, makes a great souvenir