Customer Reviews

DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Budapest

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Great organization, eye-catching photography, well written narrative and superb cartography! DK Eyewitness Travel guides have got it all but, for me, it's the photography that really separates them from the competition. And "Budapest" covers it all - restaurants, music, beer halls, walks, art galleries, museums, spas, architecture, palaces, hotels, cafés, theatres and churches. And all of the information is organized by neighbourhood in the city so I can make the most effective use of my time once I'm in a certain area.

Here's my "best practices" strategy. Read "Top 10 Budapest" first. Make some basic choices, get your mind wrapped around Budapest's geography and begin to localize your choices to certain areas. Fine tune your choice and plan your attack day by day by reading "Budapest". Familiarize yourself with some of the local customes by reading the basic country information in the back of the larger "Budapest" guide - currency, communications, etiquette, food, beer and wine, local transportation and specialized hints like local tipping practices.

Why not five stars? Frankly, with the internet now providing so much current information, I can't see the value in attempting to include lengthy (and probably outdated) lists of hotels and restaurants in densely packed small print index lists at the back of a book like this.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

Pretty good travel book, and is a good general guide to the city and surrounding areas. The gaps, however, could be a problem for someone who is not confident enough to piece it out with the locals with hand gestures and sometimes limited english. That said, it provides enough info about the big sites to give you a good walking tour of them.

The restaurant suggestions were 100% on with the ones we tried. However, due to slightly unusual Hungarian street and business naming conventions, the addresses were sometimes a little off or confusing. Also, the dictionary in the back lacked some fairly obvious terms, and this is important in Budapest as many seemingly important signs aren't translated into English (or any other language, for that matter).

All-in-all, a pretty good guide, and up to the typical DK experience.

Like all the Eyewitness Travel Guides this one is excellent.
Filled with maps,glorious pictures,practical information,historical background, and great tips as to what-to-do and what-to see; it is a complete guide to the fascinating and beautiul cities of Buda and Pest. I would never travel to new cities without taking along one of these well researched and well written/edited guides.

Like all of the Eyewitness series this one is spectacular. More web addresses would help (e.g. to make reservation at Hungarian Opera).

The eyewitness guides are a pleasure to read .Many great pictures and plenty of detail but not as heavy as some guides .I am as pleased with this one as the others I already own .These guides are books you actually pick up and read again after you have completed your trip.

As always DK travel guides are EXCELLENT complete, well written and easy to use, also make very interesting reading to get to know a city with out travelling or prior to getting there.

Perhaps it was our mistake of thinking "one" tour book would meet our needs, but this book didn't cut it for us. It was very difficult to get the 'full scoop' on any one attraction/event because each one was listed in several different places (cross-referenced) in the book and you had to read all the entries and try to piece together the information (like how much it might cost, when it might be open, how to get there), and often the information was conflicting. Despite being 'revised' in 2007, we found several errors in days and times the attractions were open, and getting to a location by tram or bus was a disaster b/c the book failed to tell you 'where' to get off to find the attraction. Also, no pricing info was included so you had no idea how much to plan for. Good luck finding some of the places just outside Budapest, as no info was given for these places of interest either. Budapest isn't exactly a city which thrives on or caters to tourists (English and German didn't get us very far), so a little more help from the tourbook would've been useful. The pictures were nice so that could recognize something once you finally found it, but we will not be lured in by glossy pictures for our next trip. We live in Europe and have been able to travel using other tour books; this will be our last DK experience.