Rick Steves' Great Britain [With Map]

How can you go wrong with Rick Steve's? It's just my kind of travel guide

This is a wonderful resource book for anyone going to the UK for the first time - or the tenth! It explains the simplest, most basic things, some of which you never considered. Literally thousands of minutiae on money, taxes, rail and bus travel and tickets, where to get information, etc. Mr. Steves also packs into the books a multitude of honest reviews of attractions, from "Don't miss" to "Skip," and includes honest descriptions of places to stay, based on your preferences. He even has suggestions for where to go based on the number of days you have available. This is the best travel guide of any kind I've ever seen, and its format is such that you can throw it in your bag and take it along. A fabulous job!

Unfortunately, the only well-worn portion of my book is the 'London' section, but the rest will eventually get used! This book was such a great help to me in not only finding a moderately priced hotel (prices...yikes!) but in getting to all the places I wanted to see. The color maps of London and the Tube system up front are easily accessible! If I needed a quick look at a map, they were right up front so I didn't have to dig through the book and stand out as a tourist. --Vicki Landes, author of "Europe For The Senses - A Photographic Journal"

Rick Steves' travel philosophy is to travel better by traveling cheaper and closer to the people. If your idea of a dream vacation is sleeping on the eighth floor of a high-rise hotel for a fortune every night, this is the wrong book for you. If your idea of wonderful is to sleep in an exquisite four-poster bed at a Scottish B & B owned by a pleasant old lady who will talk to you for hours, all for about fifty bucks a night -- buy this book. Steves has three big strengths, which are all at work in this book: The most important, by far, is the accomodations. Steves consistently finds amazingly good buys among centrally located B & Bs with friendly owners. The only problem is that everybody knows this, so getting a room on short notice in the summer at one of his spots can be dicey. The second big strength is the practical guides to sights, which include lots of interesting little details that you won't find elsewhere while telling you in no-uncertain terms which sights are must sees and which ones you should skip. Over time, his picks may not always coincide with yours -- but I almost always found his stuff on-target. The third big-strength is Steves' travel philosophy, which is especially helpful to first-time travelers (or those venturing away from the Hilton for the first time). I highly recommend that you also check out Europe Through the Back Door, Steves' classic magnum opus, now in its 19th Edition.

I actually got this book because I am going on a Rick Steves' "Best of London" tour later this year. We booked a couple of days before and after the tour to do some stuff on our own in England, and after browsing several books (Fodor's, Lonely Planet, etc.) in bookstores, I settled on Rick's book.My reasoning wasn't that I was going on one of his tours, it truly was the best book I saw on the shelves. The book isn't dominated by details on London, exactly what I wanted. In fact, Rick suggests you make London the last part of your tour. Why is this a good thing? There are plenty of books that focus on London itself, in fact every tour book I listed before has one. It would be like a foriegn traveler coming to the United States for a couple of weeks and only getting a book on Washington DC.Being that I've never been out of the United States before, I'm a little wary of making reservations and plans without seeing what I'm getting into first. So not only do you get candid reviews on the sites (rated "must see", "try to see", "see if you can", "worth noting"...and sections on what is a waste of time), information on how to get there, where to eat, but most importantly web pages to check out before hand.What's best is that Rick Steves is frank...doesn't sugar coat what is good and what is bad, what is a must see and what is a must avoid. I feel more confident making reservations and plans with this book than I would have with others.