I’ll admit it, i’m a huge fan of travel guides. My bookshelf is full of them. And i’ve only used about 20% of them for real, practical travel purposes. However, for individuals who have planned their travels 3 or 4 years in advance like myself, there is nothing quite like purchasing a new travel guide. I have a wide variety of different travel guides and found them all to have their individual strengths. The National Geographic guides offer excellent full page photos. Eyewitness travel guides are great for covering entire countries. Lonely Planet is a solid bet for information, especially on off the beaten path material. But since this is a blog about the urban world, I thought i’d highlight one particular travel guide that happens to be my favorite for cities alone: Insight Travel Guides. My last three urban travel guide purchases have all been insight guides.
What’s so special about these guides? It’s that they do everything right. They have loads of pictures (eat your heart Lonely Planet), they still have a solid amount of information and their accompanying maps are the easiest and most frequent of any guide i’ve seen. Since I know next to nothing about the company, I thought i’d take a look at what Wikipedia says about the publisher:
Insight Guides are a corporation based in London who create travel guides for commercial and domestic use. They produce atlases, city guides and maps. Other detailed guides include shopping, eating and museum guides. Insight Guides was founded by Hans Johannes Hofer. His first book, was based on the island of Bali, and was funded by a local hotel there and was published in 1970, Insight Guide:Bali in 1970. From there he built his publishing empire, exceeding 400 over guide books on over 100 destinations and in the late 90s sold his share of the company to Langenscheidt KG.
God bless the British.
