Frommer's Germany's Best-Loved Driving Tours

Rating:
Summary: Extremely useful guide.
Review: An extremely useful guide. We managed to followed most of the tours in the Bavaria region and picked up on some along the Romantic Road. These tours take you both on and off the beaten track, with recommended stops etc, whilst avoiding heavy traffic. I believe that without this guide we would have missed many of the smaller off the beaten track areas, which made the trip so much more enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: A better planning book than guide book
Review: I've just returned from my first trip to Germany, and the Best-Loved Driving Tours was among the three books I toted along. This book was an excellent tool for planning our trip -- the photos are beautiful, and the tour layout helped us figure out where we should go and what might be worth seeing. Its short descriptions of each stop helped us grasp what a place was about, and as a result we budgeted about the right amount of time for each stop.

As a tour book to take along, though, it's not nearly as helpful. On the plus side, it's the only book I encountered that imagines you might actually be *driving* through Germany (the rest of them start describing a city beginning with the train station, with no clue for car drivers on how to get downtown). Also, most of the other books don't quite grasp that you might explore outside the big cities; this one does just the opposite, which I appreciated. However, the directions from place to place are a bit sparse, and it provides almost no useful information about lodging or dining.

This is a good guide book. But don't let it be the only one you carry.

Rating:
Summary: This is a very reader-friendly, informative guide.
Review: My wife and I know Germany pretty well, but this guide was an excellent addition for our next trip there. It is very upbeat and informative, with just the right amount of detail.

Rating:
Summary: This is a very reader-friendly, informative guide.
Review: My wife and I know Germany pretty well, but this guide was an excellent addition for our next trip there. It is very upbeat and informative, with just the right amount of detail.

Rating:
Summary: Good info, but lacking details
Review: This book has lovely photos and some good suggestions for driving to places not listed in every guidebook. It also talks a bit about the various towns and cities along the routes, which makes it easier not to miss something that you otherwise would not have known about. And descriptions do not start out in the center of each town, by the train station, very useful if you are driving, rather than traveling by train. However, the actual driving directions themselves are a bit sparse - you need a good recent map of Germany to accompany the book. And there are no suggestions in this book for places to stay or to eat - unfortunate - as sometimes the book takes you to off the beaten path locales, and suggestions on where to grab a bite or a bed would be helpful.