Customer Reviews

Open Road's Paris Guide

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This guide is the second Open Road Guide I have used as a foundation for an important overseas vacation. Their motto ' Be a traveler, not a tourist' could not be more appropriate. Every restaurant, hotel and suggestion culled from this guide proved to be 'perfect'. Everything the authors write about restaurant food and hotel amenities is right on the money. Their critical opinions are a welcome change to most of the other guidebooks available in print. They select places to dine and visit that are known mostly to just the Parisians, but that still welcome a friendly traveler. (We found absolutely no evidence of that famous 'French Attitude' towards Americans at any of the suggested locales.) No giude is better than Open Road's Paris Guide for planning the perfect trip to the most amazing city in the world. "Merci" to the authors.

After being delighted by their splendid Open Road London Guide, I eagerly awaited my copy of the Paris Guide. Hélas! What a disappointment! This lightweight book has almost no personal "insider" information (unless you want to eat in the 7th arondissement), and it's padded with lots of white space and filler like bare bones lists of French wine producers and food terms (what backwoods folk are these supposedly intimate guides written for anyway?). It's impersonal, superficial, skimpy on all kinds of information, from basics like museums, which include only the biggies, and at that only includes what you could easily find on any number of websites; to shopping info, which --- in this city of shopkeepers and fabulous places to browse and buy --- is pitiful. The Marais, for instance, one of the hottest new areas of the city, chockablock with boutiques and art galleries and the like, gets a total miss. Save your francs: there are literally scores of guidebooks, large and small, that do a better job.