Customer Reviews

Vienna (Eyewitness Top 10 Travel Guides)

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I love the Top 10 travel guides because they provide a wealth of information with lots of photos and useful maps, in a very compact, portable size. They are slim volumes that can easily fit inside a small purse.
As with all the "Top 10" books, this volume provides information in the format of giving ten subsections for different subjects. For example, you have a listing of Vienna's top ten "Highlights," followed by lists of the top ten things to see at each of the top ten highlights. The Kunsthistorisches Collections, for example, is listed 3rd under "Highlights," and then, a few pages later, you have the "Top 10 Works of Art" in the Kunsthistorisches Collections listed, along with maps of the museum showing where the works are located.
This book has subjects like "Top 10 Places of Worship," "Top 10 Museums," "Top 10 Palaces and Historical Buildings," "Top 10 Parks and Gardens," "Top 10 Music Venues," "Top 10 Children's Attractions," etc. There are also, of course, top ten listings of restaurants, bars, cafes, shopping (retail stores), and the like. This book also has listings of restaurants, cafes, bars and retail shops for different sections of the city too, so that you can easily find one near your hotel.
At the back of the book is the "Streetsmart" section with its lists under headings such as "Getting to Vienna," "Getting Around Vienna," "Information and Tours," "Budget Tips in Vienna," etc. There are seven lists of Vienna hotels.
Because of its compact size, great maps (including maps of the subway, museums, palaces, and cathedrals), and the wealth of useful information on tourist sites, restaurants, shopping, etc., this is the one and only book that I carried around with me while walking through the streets of Vienna on my recent vacation.

For getting around Vienna this is a great guide. It lets you know what the essential sights are as well as the best places to eat. If you are staying longer than two or three days you may want a more thorough guide but I would still get this one for walking around the city with.

The Top 10 format is entirely self-explanatory, a list of Top 10 sights that are must-sees for any first time tourist in a given city or country. Depending on the destination, the Top 10 lists become increasingly more detailed and may include, for example, top 10 churches, museums, children's attractions, festivals, events, restaurants, cafés, pubs, parks and so on. In the second half of each book, the information is effectively repeated but organized by neighbourhood, so the prospective tourist might make the most effective use of limited time touring a given area in a city or country without missing anything of interest.

The information is all linked to beautiful photographs and allows a potential traveler to make sensible choices in advance according to his or her personal tastes. Most telling is the fact that each Top 10 title makes no attempt to be comprehensive. It is absolutely, positively aimed at the first time tourist attempting to do a one shot overview of a city or country. If that is your objective, there is little question that the DK Eyewitness Top 10 series is the hands down winner against all the competition - Blue Guide, Green Guide, Rough Guide, National Geographic, Frommer or Michelin.

As a pre-planner, Top 10 Vienna proved itself to be invaluable. My limited time was well spent and I felt comfortable filling my day with a thoroughly enjoyable selection of attractions that were well matched to my personal tastes and those of my traveling companion. There was not even a single instance where we felt we were misled by the guide into choosing an event, a food, a pub, a hotel, a church, an attraction, a park or a café that was not to our liking. And it was the ideal size to be easily carried around during our travels to keep handy as a pocket reference. High praise, indeed.

And yet, there were still minor - and I stress, minor - quibbles that irritated me when I compared the reality of Vienna to the expectations I had based on the guide. The map of the subway system is now inaccurate in that the U2 line has been extended. In the description of the "heurigen" wine bars in Grinzing on the outskirts of Vienna, no mention is made of the fact that the town is virtually a dead zone until late afternoon and nothing, I repeat, nothing is open over the noon hour. With respect to transportation, I purchased a 72 hour subway ticket and used it for the electric tram system, the S-bahn high speed rail service and the surface bus system. I realized, to my horror, afterward that I had assumed that the subway ticket was all inclusive. To this day, I don't know if that was correct or not because the guide fails to point out whether separate tickets are required for each system. The guide also fails to caution the unwary traveler of the ubiquitous petty larceny that many of the museums indulge in. After you have paid admission and entered, you are advised that for security purposes you MUST check your backpack. All well and good, except that there was always an additional charge levied which was often as much as 1 Euro. A blanket suggestion should be made that walkers in Vienna should always carry a small amount of change in their pockets. There is nothing so disconcerting as struggling to find a public water closet and discovering that there is also a 0.50 fee to enter. Ouch, that hurts in more ways than one, doesn't it! And, last but not least, having searched high and low for Kaisermelange, a coffee concoction including strong black coffee, egg yolk, honey and cognac that was recommended in the guide, I was finally advised by a kindly, sypmathetic waiter that because of salmonella concerns, a food with raw egg was no longer available in Vienna (I don't know if he was right and I didn't check on the availability of steak tartare but, to my dismay, I never found the Kaisermelange!).

Perhaps Eyewitness DK would take these suggestions under advisement for future editions.

Highly recommended for all travelers, real world and armchair alike.

Paul Weiss

I am glad I purchased this guidebook for our upcoming visit to Vienna and found the information on accommodations, restaurants and sites useful. (Since we haven't visited Vienna, I can't judge the reviews' accuracy.) However, the authors' effort to stick to the "Top 10 format" sacrifices cohesion and the book is hard to follow.

Eyewithess Travel Guides give the best complete overview of any travel book or other travel product - good organization; great pictures, maps and other graphics; interesting & concise text and descriptions about history, national foods and beverages, etc.; good suggestions for lodging and eating. They are excellet resource and reference books, but they are concise enough to give a relatively complete overview but short enough to quickly convey information, especially if you do not have a lot of free time.

Its Top 10 versions are more compact but too skeletal to give an adequate overview. The Top 10 Vienna Guide was more of a collection of lists and did not contain adequate in-depth data for my purposes. I found the regular Vienna Eyewitness Guide to be more helpful. The Top 10 Guide is great if you do not want to spend too much time. But then why bother with a book.