Customer Reviews

Frommer's New Orleans 2007 (Frommer's Complete Guides)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
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I live in New Orleans; I am in the tourism industry; and I have written about many aspects of this city in more than one genre for the past 15 years (including travel writing) and I need to make it clear that the review of this travel guide which takes issue with the fact that the writer lives part of the year in California is unfounded and unfair. To begin with, if residing in a place about which you write travel guides was a requirement, we would have very few travel guides (check the bios of most travel writers). But even if we could manage to have all travel writers living year-round in the destinations they cover, not only would they be able to cover only 1 location but moreover it would just be a bad idea. Anyone who lives somewhere 24/7 loses perspective on the place
(even the most unusual places start to feel normal if you live there long enough) and the job of a travel writer is to report on what makes a locale different, interesting, and worth visiting. As a writer, Mary Herczog offers the best of both worlds - someone with an outside perspective AND someone who is local.
Another important point is that Frommer's is the only travel guide who updates every year. The review also complained about the book warning that information may change between the time it was collected and the time it is published. That is actually a good thing. A reader should be grateful for the heads-up. Katrina or no Katrina, people come and go and businesses go out of business, etc. If the lag time between data collection and publication is a concern, then Frommer's is the best book to go with because it updates the most frequently.
Anyway, aside from these issues, this is an outstanding guide which speaks for itself - buy it, read it, plan your trip around it.

This guide has been very helpful to me. There are many tips and web sites listed. It appears to be up front about what is up and running since Katrina and what is not. It doesn't seem to play favorites, except maybe on the hotel choices. I have read on-line reviews of some of the recommended hotels, and they don't always agree. It has given me enough information that I won't feel like a total tourist when I get there. I also feel like I can make choices based on what I enjoy doing and not waste time on things I don't.

Greetings from New Orleans. No, we aren't still under water. Come visit and see for yourself. Now, the folks at Frommer's may have tried but they have fallen short. As someone who has associations with New Orleans' truly wonderful 'Ogden Museum of Southern Art', I was curious to read their review. Well, the guide has two reviews for the museum - the first of which isn't very complimentary (and which makes Frommer's look like complete idiots). Their review is of the Julia Street facility which CLOSED IN 2003!! On August 22, 2003 the Ogden Museum moved into a brand new building designed by world-famous architect Errol Barron which is then besmirched in the second review which faults the building for being too spacious (the critique said the space could have been better used to display art) which also shows they were ignorant of the impending new wing of the museum which has recently opened. The building was designed to be spacious as it itself is a work of art. Maybe I'm being picky but including a review of a site that has been closed for almost three years in an edition supposedly updated after the apocalypse (Hurricane Katrina) is symptomatic of a generally poor job of proof reading and cross-checking. I wonder if their guide to Constantinople suffers this way. I say ditch the guide and just come to New Orleans. Don't make your decisions and travel plans using a flawed guide written by non-residents. Ask a New Orleanian - they'll tell you where to go for great food and good fun.

This book definitely bills itself as a POST-Katrina guidebook, which puts it a step ahead of many other New Orleans books out there. You most certainly want a book that was written and updated after that horrific hurricane hit, since so much has changed in the city because of that.

Now, that being said, the primary author on this work appears to live in California and writes the books on California and Vegas. I think in this situation it really is critical to have a person who lives IN the city write about the city, especially with the rapid rate of change going on in New Orleans. It would be pretty much impossible for someone who pops in for a few weeks to really have a good sense of what is happening there.

One issue is that, even though the book says it's a 2007 book, you find quotes about "is scheduled to reopen by early 2007" or "with intentions of opening in January 2007". Anyone going IN 2007 is going to find this material to be fairly out of date. Again, perhaps not an issue in a slowly changing location - but in New Orleans, you really need to have information more up to date than this.

The book is very nicely laid out - it's very easy to track down the hotels, restaurants and attractions in the areas you'll be in. That being said, there are pretty much no pictures! As they say, a picture is worth 1,000 words - and that's definitely true when you're considering sightseeing. I suppose you could go online to find pictures, but if you're going to do that, you could find up-to-date attraction information while you're at it.

Recommended as a way to get the general lay of the land, and start your list of ideas, but I'd go with a website with photos and updated information before you actually head out on your trip.

As a final note, I went to New Orleans with a group of writers in mid-2007 and we had an INCREDIBLE time. The French Quarter is fully open for business, and was fantastically fun. Definitely go and visit, and bring in your tourist dollars to help them recover!

This was one of the most informative tour guides I've ever had. It not only gave tips on where to go in New Orleans post-Katrina but also gave a lot of interesting background on New Orleans and various establishments. I'd recommend it for anyone traveling to New Orleans.

good assessment of NOLA, what's open, what's in transition, and what's been destroyed