Customer Reviews

The Netherlands (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

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

 

 

"The Netherlands" is another very good guide in the generally excellent DK travel guide series. The book is very well illustrated with superior color photography and maps, and features extensive coverage of Amsterdam and other popular tourist locales. Strengths are the sections detailing with transportation, customs, and cultural norms. The book is most useful for planning a trip to the Netherlands, as it is a bit cumbersome to take on walking excursions and day trips. I have used this book to help plan travel to the Netherlands, and do recommend it on that basis.

My only critique of the book is the focus on obvious tourist destinations, which gives the short shrift to many other great destinations in the country. The section on Rotterdam, the second biggest city in the Netherlands and the capital of European modern architecture, for instance, is a couple of scant pages, which is a complete injustice. I'm not arguing that the information the book contains is poorly selected, but there are additional areas of coverage that would give a more well-rounded view of the country as a whole.

I like the DK guides, and recommend this one to anyone planning a trip (especially a first trip) to the Netherlands.

I love this series of travel books. They give so much information in an easy-to-access format. Maps are included and give a good overview of the cities and major sites. The books also give excellent insight into the culture of the country, including hints about social norms and customs. I love this series and will continue to purchase them for future travels. I highly recommend it.

I am not sure why I opted to buy the Eyewitness Travel guides to both the Netherlands and Ireland for my recent trip. They came up first on Amazon and I figured that for some reason, they might be better than the other series for these particular destinations.

How wrong I was.

I understand that for some, these guides may be the way to go. However, I have a hard time understanding exactly who they appeal to. As an experienced, independent, young (26) traveler, here are some of the problems with this guide (and with the entire Eyewitness series):

-The guide reads like a textbook. From someone accustomed to the easy to read, helpful, conversational tone adopted by other series such as Lonely Planet, Let's Go and Rough Guides, the text in this book was small, dense, and frankly too boring to read entire sections. It really did remind me of reading a high school textbook on the destination, rather than a guide book meant to be read while in situ. The descriptions provided no sense of whether a particular sight or destination was worth seeing or not. Prioritizing what to see is a big challenge when traveling, and other guidebooks usually explain which are the "must sees," which can be passed over, and what the highlights are for all the things in between. In this book, it feels like the authors were paid to write the descriptions by the tourist bureau, or like they may have borrowed them directly from the source.

As someone who normally reads guidebooks very thoroughly, highlighting and folding pages, these books remained completely intact - not a good sign.

-Many of the sections look pretty because of the beautiful illustrations, and some of them sound good in theory - for example, the canal walk in Amsterdam describing each of the different houses. However, bring the book on your trip and see how realistic it is to read their 9 point text while carrying this brick of a book around with you. And yes, this book is significantly heavier than any other guidebook I've used, because of the glossy paper.

-The phrasebook in the back is one page, double sided, and has no pronunciation guide whatsoever. For a book that is meant to cover an entire country, this is unacceptable.

-I was shocked when I turned to the section about communications. The section focuses on phone cards for public phones without so much as mentioning the fact that for a small price you can get a Dutch SIM card to put in your mobile phone, what most travelers do nowadays to stay in touch. It barely discusses email as well (and whether there are wifi capabilities), while devoting other sections to post offices and even the former Dutch currency (now that's helpful).

-I don't understand the way these guides are organized in general. The practical information you need when traveling to a given destination, such as restaurant and hotel listings, are crammed at the back of the book - so if you are reading about a particular city because you are THERE, you need to constantly flip to page 423 (etc.) to get the information you need. Within things like maps, when "must see" attractions are starred, they do not include such useful facts as hours of operation and never include museum fees, etc.

-Maps. Oh the maps. Actually the maps are one of the few things I ended up using this book for, but even then - the map of Amsterdam is divided three ways *along a major street*, so I had to keep flipping between not two, but THREE different maps just to get where I was going. Amsterdam is a tiny city. The map should be a fold out (they did it for that canal tour...) and fit on one page! And the illustrated maps were ridiculous. I don't need to see what a building looks like or how many trees there are in between each building - if you can fit more than four central streets on the map, that would be far more useful!

Ok, I know I'm ranting so I will finish up. There are other things that irked me about these guides, such as the museum plans they include (aren't you going to get a better, more up to date one in the museum? why waste space?) and the scarcity of practical information. But let me close by trying to think of who this book might be good for.

You may want to purchase this book if:

-you are going on an organized bus tour of the destination and want to supplement your trip with textbook information
-you want to look at the illustrations but are not planning to read the book cover to cover
-you already know exactly where you are sleeping, eating and going out
-you don't plan to carry the book around with you
-you want to keep everything in one book and not pick up brochures at any of your destinations
-you don't mind reading 9 pt. text and flipping between multiple sections of a heavy book to find what you need

If any of the above do not apply to you, try Lonely Planet, Let's Go, Rough Guides or probably any other guidebook series. That's all, I'm going out to try and resell these books. And figure out why the heck they are so popular to begin with.

This book was recommended to me by a friend that takes tour groups to Holland on a regular basis. She said it's the best, most comprehensive book she's ever seen. I'll find out when I take it on our upcoming trip.

I'm living in Amsterdam and if you don't have the Amsterdam Guide, you can easily buy this one that has all you need to know about the city plus the informations about the rest of the country.

We do a lot of traveling in Europe and these Eyewitness Guides are simply the best on the market. Concise, easy to use and having a good balance of practicality along with an eye on culture and history.
Highly recommended.
d.b.

This book is both interesting to read and fun to see the pictures. I will be going to The Netherlands in a few months and will likely bring this with me. The information seems current, but a few of the web sites either no longer exist, or are in Dutch only. Google translator does a good job turning the latter into English.

Overall, I think this is a good travel guide and would seriously consider this series for other areas we may visit in the future.

Even without looking inside this one gets 4 stars from me, as they rightly call it The Netherlands and not 'Holland' as far too many do.
The Eyewitness guides are great, sometimes a bit too much beaten track and tourist trappy, but they do paint a very good picture of the countries you're travelling in.
And please, do appreciate the amount of work that goes into a guide like this! All information is updated regularly, even yearly on the Top Ten guides. I know, I happen to have worked on the Dutch translation of a number of them :)

I like the DK publications. This gives me great information and visuals to go with them.