Customer Reviews

Top 10 Copenhagen (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

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

 

 

I am generally a fan of DK guidebooks, including some of the small-format "Top 10" guides, but I cannot recommend this guidebook without qualification. The book is appealing for its compact size and focus on the most significant sites in several categories. Like other DK books, the photographs are superior and provide the most compelling reason to buy the book. In general the book discusses the major sites the typical tourist will want to see (Tivoli, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Kongens Nytorv, Nyhavn, etc.) like many other books do, but due to its diminutive size detail is limited on any attraction. Normally that is fine for a book for use on the ground (rather than a larger book used for planning), but here the material is not especially well organized, and some of the ratings of restaurants and hotels are questionable: I do not consider "The Square" (Radhuspladsen) hotel to be a "Luxury Hotel", for instance.

While there will always be subjective disagreements about ratings, the impression I got while attempting to use this book over a week in Copenhagen recently was that the information was not well presented, and the "pull out map and guide" was actually worse than useless. The map I got at the train station was infinitely more useful than the horrible (and tiny) T-shaped pull out map in this guide: if you want to get really lost just try using it to navigate from the Radhuspladsen to Nyhavn, which is one of the most heavily traveled routes for tourists. Seriously, do yourself a favor if you buy this book and throw the map away.

The book is slickly packaged and might make a nice souvenir, but as a useful travel guide there are many better alternatives on the market.

As with the earlier review, the scattershot nature of the "top 10" format makes it inconvenient to find out about some places.

Much worse than that, however, is that the hours given for some museums are not right! We missed seeing a museum because the book told us it was open on Mondays, when in fact it was closed.

Also, the book mentions some attractions as being "near" other popular sites, but without enough information to find them (not even a north/south/east/west hint). "Near" sometimes turns out to mean 1 km away.

This book is probably better as a supplement to another guidebook, particularly because of the good maps of central Copenhagen, but it is not good enough on its own.

The "Top 10" format has its problems and they are much in evidence in this little guide to Copenhagen. Information about the same site is found scattershot through out the book instead of in one convenient spot. I found it pretty irritating. The maps, however, are very good, and best of all, a nice little compact separate map is to be found tucked into the flap of the back cover. The photos, as usual in this series, are helpful and vivid. On the whole, though, with the exception of the map, this is a better souvenir than it is a guidebook.

Concise and to the point - easy to find the must-see places. Has a removable map inside back cover with streets.