We love using travel guide books to plan our trips. They contain great information like itineraries, “best of” lists and more! They are created by experts and locals that want to highlight every location. So let the authors do some work for you and help you plan your upcoming trip.
But how do you find the best travel guide book for every location? Here we’ll share some of our general thoughts on some of the top travel guidebooks as well as a list of our favorite books for each location.
You may wonder how we know what the best travel guide book for each location is. Well, we’ve tried them all. We use our local library, check out all the guidebooks that are easily found in the USA, and choose the best for our trip style. You can do this too. But if you don’t have time for a library visit and only want to buy one book, keep reading. We think that if you like some of our itineraries and travel lists, we’re sure you’ll like our favorite travel guide books as well. So let us do the work for you and choose the best travel guide books for your upcoming travel destination!
DK Eyewitness
DK Eyewitness travel guides are short, succinct and visually appealing. They provide lots of “Top 10” lists and are generally great for trips that are short and focus very closely on one area. We love using DK Eyewitness travel guides for large cities.
Insight Guides
Insight Guides are great if you’re looking to understand the culture and history of an area you’re going to travel to. They do a great job of relating this information to your travels. However, these guides fall short in actual information that will help you plan what to do in a particular area.
Footprint Guides
Footprint Guides are incredibly detailed and specialized. They focus on Central and South America and are chuck full of information. That being said, they are hard to scan for the information you’re looking for. So if you want all the information and you don’t mind reading the whole book, these are for you. If you’d like something more visual and easy to scan, skip them.
Lonely Planet
The Lonely Planet travel series may be one of the most recognized names in the travel guide book game. And for good reason. Lonely Planet does a great job helping to plan large overland trips to a wide geographic region, such as a country or a group of countries/regions. Lonely planet itineraries tend to be faster paced than other guidebooks and therefore include more. We love the Lonely Planet Best Trips series as they provide great information for roadtrippers.
Moon
Moon is excellent for smaller geographic regions, like states or territories. They focus heavily on North American locations and provide enough information and detail to spend a week in one of these smaller locations. They’re also great for providing information on the popular destinations as well as top things to do at lesser know destinations. We love Moon for their road trip and hiking series and their general adventure/active travel focus
Rick Steves
Rick Steves does an excellent job creating guidebooks for popular European destinations. These guides are great for folks wanting to visit all of the top attractions a destination offer. However, these guides do fall short in helping people plan more adventurous and outdoorsy activities. However, definitely rely on their itineraries for populous European destination.
Rough Guides
Rough Guides are similar to Lonely Planet in that they offer great information on larger geographic regions. So these are also great if you’re planning a larger trip or a road trip. Our favorite feature of these books is that they tell you what NOT to do in addition to giving you advice on what to do.
Best Travel Guide Books by Location
Caribbean – Lonely Planet Caribbean Islands
- Belize – Fodor’s Belize
- Jamaica – Lonely Planet Jamaica
- Puerto Rico – Fodor’s Puerto Rico
- Virgin Islands – There is nothing good that is still in print – my favorite is Moon but it’s old
- Australia – Lonely Planet best trips Australia
- United States – Lonely Planet Best Trips USA
- New England area – Moon New England Road Trips
- Maine – Lonely Planet Maine and Arcadia
- New Hampshire – Fodor’s Maine, Vermont & New Hampshire
- New York – Moon New York State
- Vermont – Fodor’s Maine, Vermont & New Hampshire
- The South – Lonely Planet Florida and the South’s Best Trips
- Florida – Fodor’s Florida
- The Midwest/Central
- Michigan – Moon’s Michigan
- Minnesota – I don’t like any of them 🙁
- North Dakota – there isn’t one 🙁
- Wisconsin – Moon Wisconsin
- Wyoming – Moon Yellowstone and Grand Teton – Or Moon Wyoming if you actually want to visit the whole state and have LOTS of time
- The Southwest – Lonely Planet Southwest USA
- The Northwest – Lonely Planet Pacific Northwest’s Best Trips
- Washington – Moon Pacific Northwest Road Trip – This does focus mainly on the Western part of the state
- New England area – Moon New England Road Trips
