Customer Reviews

Bahamas for Dummies, Second Edition

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I love to thoroughly research and plan vacations, gleaning recommendations and experiences from as many independent sources as possible. Therefore, I ordered BOTH Frommer's Bahamas 2007 and Bahamas for Dummies to get two different opinions. Bahamas for Dummies repeats Frommer's hotel and restaurant recommendations WORD-FOR-WORD. The Dummies who wrote this book obviously did NO independent research of their own. In fact in turns out Wiley published both books. The only redeeming feature is the cute little post-it flags, that I can stick inside my Frommers guide book!

I bought the 2007 edition in 2011 thinking to save money. I found the information so dated to be useless for planning my vacation. At least 70% of the websites listed no longer exist. Current prices verified by phone are almost DOUBLE those quoted in the book.

Also, instead of covering all the Bahamas islands, it lists only the half-dozen most popular locations, with the vast majority of the pages spent on New Providence (Nassau/Paradise Island) and Grand Bahama (Lucaya/Freeport). Those planning to visit Out Islands would be better served with another book.

I found the guide had a lot of useful information about the best hotels, restaurants and tours. This is exactly the information I needed. It also had a great section on the pro's and con's of each major island. This was helpful in figuring out where I wanted to vacation. I have read a lot of information on the web, and frommer's website, but I found this guide to have it organized more efficiently and it is more comprehensive. It was an easy and fun read and also had information on the history of the Bahamas. I really enjoyed it and it helped with my vacation planning.

I thought this was a great effort to present the true Bahamas, but unfortunately, there are some inaccuracies that seem to confuse The Bahamas with other countries in the West Indies, particularly in referring to the language. Bahamians would never refer to their dialect as patois. (that's Jamaica and other countries). Bahamians just call their English dialect "Bahamian dialect". And some of the words are not in general use as stated, e.g. nyam is Jamaican, and bobo, if used, more usually refers to Rastas, not morons.