Customer Reviews

Fodor's New Zealand, 7th Edition: The Guide for All Budgets, Where to Stay, Eat, and Explore On and Off the Beaten Path (Fodor's Gold Guides)

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Most Fodor's guidebooks are relatively good, but I found this one to be middling at best. The sparseness of maps and total absence of photographs (although they do manage to insert a color glossy advertisement for American Express) really hurts this book. New Zealand is a unique place and deserves substantially more detail than it receives here. Interestingly, Fodor's also publishes a book titled "Fodor's Exploring New Zealand" which is quite good, provides much better coverage of matters of interest, and has numerous excellent color photographs. Of the two, I would definitely opt for "Fodor's Exploring New Zealand," which is a much more user friendly and informative guidebook.

The best feature of this book is the "Smart Travel Tips" section which briefly summarizes important travel information about New Zealand travel, such as driving and flying information, money, mail, and tax laws, etc. This section is at the very beginning of the book and is really the only reason to even consider purchasing this book as the information in concise and crucial to travelers. Most of this information is available in other, better, guidebooks, though. Because of the deficiencies in other areas of this book, I recommend either "Fodor's Exploring New Zealand" or another guidebook.