Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Paris (Paris, 3rd ed)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I've made >20 visits to France all together. Here are my reviews of the best guides....to meet you r exact needs.....I hope these are helpful and that you have a great visit! I always gauge the quality of my visit by how much I remember a year later......this review is designed to help you get the guide that will be sure YOU remember your trip many years into the future. Travel Safe and enjoy yourself to the max!

Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet has City and Out To Eat Guides. They are all about the experience so they focus on doing, being, getting there, and this means they have the best detailed information, including both inexpensive and really spectacular restaurants and hotels, out-of-the-way places, weird things to see and do, the list is endless.

Blue Guides
Without doubt, the best of the walks guides.... the Blue Guide has been around since 1918 and has extremely well designed walks with lots of unique little side stops to hit on just about any interest you have. If you want to pick up the feel of the city, this is the best book to do that for you. This is one that you end up packing on your 10th trip, by which time it is well worn.

MapGuide
MapGuide is very easy to use and has the best location information for hotels, tourist attractions, museums, churches etc. that they manage to keep fairly up to date. It's great for teaching you how to use the Metro. The text sections are quick overviews, not reviews, but the strong suite here is brevity, not depth. I strongly recommend this for your first few times learning your way around the classic tourist sites and experiences. MapGuide is excellent as long as you are staying pretty much in the center of the city.

Time Out
The Time Out guides are very good. Easy reading, short reviews of restaurants, hotels, and other sites, with good public transport maps that go beyond the city centre. Many people who buy more than one guidebook end up liking this one best!

Let's Go
Let's Go is a great guide series that specializes in the niche interest details that turn a trip into a great and memorable experience. Started by and for college students, these guides are famous for the details provided by people who used the book the previous year. They continue to focus on providing a great experience inexpensively. If you want to know about the top restaurants, this is not for you (use Fodor's or Michelin). Let's Go does have a bewildering array of different guides though. Here's which is what:
Budget Guide is the main guide with incredibly detailed information and reviews on everything you can think of.
City Guide is just as intense but restricted to the single city.
PocketGuide is even smaller and features condensed information
MapGuide's are very good maps with public transportation and some other information (like museum hours, etc.)

Michelin
Famous for their quality reviews, the Red Michelin Guides are for hotels & Restaurants, the Green Michelin Guides are for main tourist destinations. However, the English language Green guide is the one most people use and it has now been supplemented with hotel and restaurant information. These are the serious review guides as the famous Michelin ratings are issued via these books.

Fodor's
Fodor's is the best selling guide among Americans. They have a bewildering array of different guides. Here's which is what:
The Gold Guide is the main book with good reviews of everything and lots of tours, walks, and just about everything else you could think of. It's not called the Gold guide for nothing though....it assumes you have money and are willing to spend it.
SeeIt! is a concise guide that extracts the most popular items from the Gold Guide
PocketGuide is designed for a quick first visit
UpCLOSE for independent travel that is cheap and well thought out
CityPack is a plastic pocket map with some guide information
Exploring is for cultural interests, lots of photos and designed to supplement the Gold guide

I always buy Lonely Planet guides, but I am returning this one. I tried to use it to plan my next trip to Paris in two weeks. It's very frustrating. The map is difficult to follow, and there is very few hotel information. It also keeps referring to a map PP396-9 which doesn't exist (Try look up Museum Louve).

It does however has a lot of other cute-but-useless info .. for example .. where a straight guy can get his facial done. Well, if you are into such things, get this guide. I am returning mine.

This is the letter I sent to Lonely Planet...I hope it helps!

I have taken my time about emailing you with my comments - because of how frustrated I was with your book (LP Paris)- I didn't want to waste any more of my time emailing! I bought a Paris only book because I wanted a detailed book on Paris - I have travelled there quite a bit before, so I wanted some help to see and enjoy some out of the way aspects of the city. After seeing many people with the Green Guide(s), I purchased it. However, I hated its alphabetical organization - and its maps were dreadful. So I paid more than 20 euros for the LP Paris guide. I was sorely disappointed. I cannot comment on restaurants or hotels because I was staying with friends. I did notice quite a few very nice vegetarian restaurants that were not in the guide. I did enjoy using the maps - they were helpful. However...(in no particular order)...
1. The listings of internet cafes is really lame. Your reviewer lists only the MOST expensive ones and misses many cheaper ones relatively nearby - or not. Yes, they may come and go (the EasyInternet is long closed, by the way) but still the list is inadequate.
2. The Musee Rodin - first of all I had a hard time finding it in the index - "Auguste Rodin", fine, but that isn't the name of the museum. The reviewer fails to mention the excellent audioguide. See next.
3. Musee de la Magic and Curiosite (whatever), this place is crap. The curiosity side is junk - lame optical illusions and dusty old wind up toys. The magic is about 10 minutes worth, well done, but the admission is around 7 or 8 euros. A rip off. The audioguide is one of the worst ever. Technically it doesn't work and the pronunciation and grammar make it next to useless. This was about 4 or 5 euros. I am certain that your reviewer did not go to this place. This is what a guide is supposed to be about - letting me know the scoop and saving me some money! This is Paris - the reviewer(s) should get it right, it isn't like this is some new place to go! Wear out some shoe leather! ;)
4. Musee National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oceanie - hello Steve! This is closed! The closing was planned for some time.
5.Fontainebleu - you mention the SNCF combination ticket (good) but don't say where it can be purchased - only one booth 2 floors below the Gare de Lyon. I spent almost 45 minutes looking all around for it - along with some nice German tourists, by the way! Go the extra mile (or kilometer) Mr. Fallon, actually get out there and help - be clear and specific! See next!

6. Probably the most lame and infuriating...the 183 bus to Orly-Sud. Hey why not mention that there are, in fact, TWO 183s - one that actually goes to the airport and one that only goes as far as the Maire. I found out the hard way, losing almost an hour getting onto the right 183 after merrily skipping onto the wrong 183 waiting at the metro stop (enjoying my "good" luck). By the way I know you didn't actually take this bus, either (shoe leather, shoe leather) because, had you done so, you couldn't have failed to notice the block of slightly rundown apartments designed by Le Corbusier which the bus runs right by - well worth checking out! I barely made my plane. Again, travel guides are supposed to be written from real experience, not from some internet search or a phone call to the Tourist Agency. Boooo!
7. This criticism is not unique to this book - I am simply tired of carrying around extra pages - 7 pages of LP advertisements, but even more annoying, the at least 30 pages of the standard LP guidance (10% of this book) to wit: a section on litter, business hours, drinking and driving (duh), "air travel glossary", HIV/AIDS organizations (important yes, but why is it in a travel guide?)...so much of this is just re-hashed from LP guide to LP guide.
8. Finally, the maps are well drawn, but the indexes associated with them are absurd. They assume you know WHERE the place is, so you can find the number?!! NO, I don't know where it is (yes, that is why I am using the map!), so I want to LOOK IT UP, ALPHABETICALLY! Listing numerically only helps if e.g. you are near #161 and are curious to know what else is around in the area, but even then you must pick them out of the index because they are further broken down (eating,drinking, the ever helpful "other"), and not strictly listed in numerical order.
9. Along with the not just in this guide part, I find it really rapacious of the author to mention the LP "Ekno" phone card. It is SO EXPENSIVE!! Can the author be any more biased? I bought a Delta Multimedia card for 15 euros, available at pretty much any tobacco shop, and got 400 minutes of calling to the US!! This was from a private phone - from a public phone it was worth 100 minutes. The LP LAME-O Ekno is 49 cents a minute!! Please!
OK that is most of it! I am very disappointed in this guide. It should be super, FILLED with information based on actual experience - and it is clear that it is not.

I think Lonely Planet is just resting on its laurels with this one. Everyone knows where to go in Paris, the basics, it is the details that would make a book worth buying. Too often, this book doesn't have them.

Surprisingly superficial guidebook from a publisher that usually sets the standard. The book might be useful for those who have never visited Paris and don't intend to spend more than a couple of days. For most visitors, simple web searches will result in more substantive information. I was really disappointed by page after page of cliches. Weight is a consideration when choosing a guidebook, and we could easily have been spared introductory chapters - why lug around pages of simplistic analysis of the French? This updated edition has all the faddish content of a Travel channel guide (page 274's "Queer Eye for the Metrosexual" section is a typical example). Nothing seems improved over previous editions, and some content is quite baffling: why not just save paper and overall weight, rather than including a "Thanks" section (p.361) that concludes, "As always, I'd like to dedicate my efforts to my partner, Michael Rothschild, whose knowledge of menu French grows in proportion to...well, never mind."?

This is an excellent guide for those travelers who don't mind getting lost in Paris. I took two travel guides with me on my recent Christmas-to-New-Year's trip to Paris, and for several reasons this Lonely Planet guide did not measure up to the other guide (Rick Steves' Paris 2005). Although the Lonely Planet guide enabled me to find last minute, affordable hotel accomodations in the otherwise expensive Latin Quarter, while in Paris, it continually frustrated me in my attempts to locate attractions such as the Louvre, Orsay, Picasso, and Rodin museums and the Pere Lachaise Cemetery (where Proust, Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, and Colette, among others, are buried). Although the Musee Rodin is described on page 111 of the guide, for instance, to actually locate that museum in Paris, one must refer not only to the map on pages 389-91, but also to the accompanying indexes as well. This is not an easy way to locate an attraction in a labyrinth of Parisian streets and neighborhoods.

Despite its shortcomings, LP's guide provides an excellent orientation of the city's culture, architecture, and history, and features several worthwhile walking tours through the Marais, Left and Right Bank, and central districts of Paris. Paris is the ultimate European travel destination, and first-time visitors will need more than this guide to explore the city's bohemian cafés, its fascinating streets and neighborhoods, and its many, great art museums.

G. Merritt

For my wife, 14-year-old nephew, 12-year-old neice and I, the Lonely Planet guide to Paris was perfect. (Nephew and neice to uncle: "No museums!") It suggested renting bicycles at the train station to ride to Giverny and told us on which days and at what times we could rent toy boats in the Jardin du Luxembourg -- two highlights of our trip. It suggested getting the Carte Orange Metro pass and explained the airports so well that we had the courage to take the train into the city (which worked out very well). The one restaurant suggestion we took from the guidebook (Le Bateau Lavoir in Montmarte) was very nice. The maps were useful (but you still need a pocket map book) and the book is not too large or fat. I liked the color pictures before the trip, and now that I open the book, I like them even more as a momento. We also had the Frommers, Michelin and Eyewitness Paris books. They were better as references. The Lonely Planet guide was better to have at hand while we were out and about. I wish it gave prices in Euros and not Francs, but I assume the next edition will.

This is one of my favorite Lonely Planet guides. It is clear and well-presented, and contains just enough information on Paris and some nearby attractions, without going overboard with detail. The restaurant recommendations are particularly good.

Used this guidebook on my second visit to Paris. This guidebook has better maps than any other guidebooks I have used when travelling through Italy, France, and Holland. I tried several of the restaurants listed in the book, explored some of the more obscure attractions listed, and it helped make my Paris experience wonderful. You won't need any other books on Paris if you get this one.

Lonely Planet is my default guidebook wherever I travel (usually on business). That being said, this one was a letdown, particularly the hotel section. Paris is a notoriously difficult city to find a hotel (suited for business travelers), high-priced palaces and dumpy dives abound, but clean and modern hotels with updated amenities (individual thermostats, real double beds, computer ports, non-smoking rooms) in Arrondissement 1, 8 or 17 (near Arc du Triomphe) are not easy to find. This book doesn't help, pointing out Crillon, but missing Sofitel la Faubourg (directly across the street).

This book has all the information on important places and some that could be considered as off the beaten path.

It is easy reading and the layout is great.

Comes with a fold out map.

I would recommend it for someone that is looking for a reliable no-nonsense guide