USA Places - Lonely Planet Vienna
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List Price: $17.99
USA Places Price: $14.03
Your Save: $ 3.96 ( 22% )
Availability: Usually ships in 3 to 6 weeks
Manufacturer: Lonely Planet Publications
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 914
EAN: 9781741041996
ISBN: 1741041996
Label: Lonely Planet Publications
Manufacturer: Lonely Planet Publications
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 250
Publication Date: 2004-09-15
Publisher: Lonely Planet Publications
Studio: Lonely Planet Publications
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Editorial Reviews:
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Viennese waltzes, the blue Danube, Mozart, Haydn and Strauss, prancing Spanish horses, strong coffee and creamy cakes, elegant Art Noveau and grandiose imperial palaces - Vienna reigns supreme as Europe's cultural capital. Whether you're here for the music or the museums, the luxury shopping or the fine-art galleries, you'll find your Vienna in this smart and stylish guide. • HIT THE STREETS and gaze up in awe at Vienna's stunning architecture - our detailed walking tours guide you through the city's cobbled streets
• STAY IN STYLE in baroque hotels stuffed with antique furniture or the understated luxury of a modernist interior
• DINE OUT in the best Viennese restaurants and the funkiest ethnic cafes
• GO CLASSICAL at the opera, chill out to jazz or dance the night away in a FJ bar - our entertainment listings have it covered
• ESCAPE to the Vienna Woods, the Danube Valley or over the border to Bratislava with our inspirational excursion ideas
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Helpful
Comment: Very helpful. I had a day to spend in Vienna and I could quickly find all the sites I needed/wanted to go, plus discover new ones.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Worst Lonely Planet Ever Purchased
Comment: A deeply disappointing, if not awful, guidebook to Vienna. I have purchased dozens of Lonely Planet guidebooks, and have had universally good experiences with the series until purchasing Lonely Planet Vienna. The guidebook was filled with inaccuracies, including wrong addresses, grossly mistaken opening hours, and misleading maps. The supposed insider recommendations often led to very touristy restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues. Do yourself a favor and buy a guidebook from another series; this one will certainly lead you astray.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Up the Danube without a Paddle
Comment: I packed two guidebooks for my trip to Vienna: this one, and an ancient Michelin Green Guide to Austria that devoted about 20 pages to Vienna. I found the latter more useful, even though much of the information was frozen in a long-forgotten 1978.
It's difficult to look up specific information in this guide, and, once found, it's sometimes misleading. "The regal rooms of Schloss Schonbrunn are in a league of their own in Vienna - the Kaiser apartments of the Hofburg hardly come close." Perhaps. But the Schonbrunn was so packed with tour groups that I ran through the forty rooms that are open for viewing as quickly as possible just to get out of the place. By contrast, a visit to the Hofburg included a moving exhibit on the wife of the emperor Franz Joseph; for me, this humanized the rooms and added a depth that the mere viewing of endless amounts of gold leaf could not.
The typeface of this book is too small and faint, and the maps are unreadable. A reference for the Albertina is given as `Map pp.240-3.' Turning to page 240, I found tiny dots with tiny numbers going up to 351, but no dot with a 3. After much searching of page 240, I found the 3 on an inset map on page 241. This is inexcusable in a guidebook.
Vienna is too wonderful to entrust to this guide. Friends who carried the Eyewitness Travel Guide to Vienna at least had a book that was readable.
Customer Rating:
Summary: New format messes up a classic
Comment: I've long been a Lonely Planet fan, never thinking twice about buying the appropriate Lonely Planet book whenever I travel. However, the new format and emphasis of the LP guides has made me re-think my commitment.
Specifically, the "Fact for the Visitor" section has been greatly reduced, and moved under the confusingly titled "Directory" section. Unfortunately, this is difficult to locate because the Table of Contents has been bowdlerized from the former detailed breakdown into a simple section listing. If you want to find a specific piece of information, you now have to guess which section it might be hiding in (as in "Directory" -- which is almost nothing like a directory), then flip the to beginning of that section for the more detailed contents.
The new, less coherent, structure is frustrating enough, but when you get each section, you find it very hard to read. One of the first things that you learn about graphic design and publishing is that sans serif typefaces are difficult to read for long passages and should only be used sparingly. The new guides have turned this on its head, and now very light sans serif faces are used almost everywhere (contrast this with earlier editions where sans serif is only used for headings). I find it difficult to read for more than a few paragraphs, which is very annoying.
Being able to locate, and read the information are the two most fundamental things a guidebook needs to have, and these new editions really fail.
Which raises the biggest problem of all -- LP seems to be changing its emphasis from a guide which provided lots of useful information to the budget traveler as well as the higher end independent traveler. The new guide really de-emphasizes the budget traveler, in favor of being a generic, middle of the road guide. Which, from someone who looks to get the most from his travel dollar, is extremely disappointing. In contrast with my second edition copy of this guide, the fourth edition lists half as many budget accommodations, and twice as many mid-range to expensive ones.
On the plus side, the maps *finally* include a grid, making it much easier to find locations on them.
On the whole though, LP has taken the guides I've loved for years, and made them much less valuable to me. In the future, I'll be shopping around for guides, instead of knowing that I can trust LP without a second thought.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Incredibly helpful
Comment: The fancy of going to Vienna next summer crossed my mind more than once so I decided to pick this up just to get some more information on the City of Music. It's a very concise book that can be easily toted around in a bag or pocket, which I immediately liked because should I go I would want to keep it on hand. I liked the layout for places to stay, going from campgrounds to hostels, to the hotels, going from one star to five. It has a great listing for restaurants and has the city pretty much covered in respects to places to visit and a calendar of events, which makes planning a trip a lot easier. The history was a nice added bonus for someone not knowing about the city, as well as historical people that spent time/grew up in Vienna (ie: Mozart). Colour photos and things such as political mindset, attitude towards children, the legal system are nice touches as well. However, take the prices with a grain of salt, especially with the new introduction of the Euro.
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