Customer Reviews

Fodor's Hong Kong, 19th Edition (Fodor's Gold Guides)

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

 

 

This is a poor compilation for a guide. Much of the information is not enlightning and you can find better and more accurate information in the free guides in Hong Kong Airport and in your Hotel room.

I have better quality of information from my visit the previous year than this guide can provide.

I'm primarily using it now to see whether it can guide me to the better restaurants this time around, I will let you know if it failed on that count to when I come back.

Don't waste you money.

I sure hope that the 20th edition is better, because the 19th edition is simply bad. The information is useful here and there, but there are a number of inaccuracies that are extremely frustrating to a traveler. Examples:

1) The book states that American citizens (or more specifically anyone but UK) can get a day visa at the border of mainland China after taking the train there. We thankfully asked the Hong Kong Tourist Board (a much better source of info, btw) before hopping on the train for a 1 hour ride, because it turns out that this is wrong. You need to obtain this visa in Central or Kowloon BEFORE getting to the Chinese border.

2) The location of sites on the maps is just plain wrong at times. For example, we went on a lengthy walk to find the Cityplaza shopping center, which the shopping-in-Causeway-Bay map clearly shows is located in Causeway Bay. It turns out this shopping center is in Quarry Bay several miles away from where it's annotated on the Fodor map. In addition, ALL the maps in the entire book are very low res, so that often only one in every 5 streets is named.

3) We went looking for a recommended Vietnamese restaurant based on its location on the Fodor map. It turns out again that the annotation/number was in the wrong place on the map, on the wrong street. The right street was only two blocks away (impossible to tell since neither the right or the wrong street was named on the map), which wouldn't be too horrible unless you consider that the book itself says that it's not a neighborhood that is safe enough to be randomly walking around.

None of these alone is horrible, but when you add these mistakes (and others I'm sure we didn't stumble across) together, it simply adds frustration to anyone's rare vacation that should be relaxing.

Don't buy this book.

No matter how bad remarks were given to the Lonely Planet's edition on Hong Kong, after reading the Fodor's guide I went to bookstore to buy the edition of Lonely Planet. Disappointing, indeed.