Product Description

Around the World, continent by continent, here is the best the world has to offer: 1,000 places guaranteed to give travelers the shivers. Sacred ruins, grand hotels, wildlife preserves, hilltop villages, snack shacks, castles, festivals, reefs, restaurants, cathedrals, hidden islands, opera houses, museums, and more. Each entry tells exactly why it's essential to visit. Then come the nuts and bolts: addresses, websites, phone and fax numbers, best times to visit. Stop dreaming and get going.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #656 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-22
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 972 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This hefty volume reminds vacationers that hot tourist spots are small percentage of what's worth seeing out there. A quick sampling: Venice's Cipriani Hotel; California's Monterey Peninsula; the Lewis and Clark Trail in Oregon; the Great Wall of China; Robert Louis Stevenson's home in Western Samoa; and the Alhambra in Andalusia, Spain. Veteran travel guide writer Schultz divides the book geographically, presenting a little less than a page on each location. Each entry lists exactly where to find the spot (e.g. Moorea is located "12 miles/19 km northwest of Tahiti; 10 minutes by air, 1 hour by boat") and when to go (e.g., if you want to check out The Complete Fly Fisher hotel in Montana, "May and Sept.-Oct. offer productive angling in a solitary setting"). This is an excellent resource for the intrepid traveler.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Newsweek : "At last, a book that tells you what's beautiful, what's fun and what's just unforgettable—everywhere on earth."
—Newsweek

From the Back Cover
Around the World, continent by continent, here is the best the world has to offer: 1,000 places guaranteed to give travelers the shivers. Sacred ruins, grand hotels, wildlife preserves, hilltop villages, snack shacks, castles, festivals, reefs, restaurants, cathedrals, hidden islands, opera houses, museums, and more. Each entry tells exactly why it's essential to visit. Then come the nuts and bolts: addresses, websites, phone and fax numbers, best times to visit. Stop dreaming and get going.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful travel to do list!
This is a great book to get ideas for traveling. It covers the many obvious places, but also covers those that one would not find on a generic travel tour. It covers sites, entertainment, hotels, restaurants and more. It also tells you the best time to travel. It even tells you when it is the most crowded and gives advice not to travel to these areas during some of the most crowded times. It covers festivals, markets, fairs and more. Now, the restaurants and hotel recommendations are not for those on a budget, but it gives you the "musts" for places to stay and eat in that area. It also provides websites for most of the locations so you can look up additional information since it only gives a brief overview. This is a great book for those who are wanting to plan a trip, but don't really know where to go. This pretty much covers every region of the world. I am personally backpacking through Europe and Asia. I am still reading through this book with a highlighter and little post-it to bookmark my favorite places. I am not using this as a trip planner, but as an endless book of recommendations for my trip.

A different kind of traveller
I don't know, I guess I must be a different kind of traveller. I like to visit places that are astonishing yet not highly visited. I'm the kind of traveller that goes to those "best-kept secret" desinations to see things that most people don't even know about. I mean, who goes to Moosonee for vacation?

I bought 1,000 places hoping it would recomment places of great beauty, off the beaten track, where culture and ambiance haven't been homogenized into modern life yet. Sort of life Globe Trekker, only in book form.

How disappointed I was to find out it was recommending tourist traps, five star hotels, expensive tourist haunts and so on instead of giving us insider info on where the little-know best places are.

It's not a bad book, it's just full of places you are bound to see if you visit the major tourist places anyway. So much so that it seemed as if the author might have gotten her info from visitor's bureaus instead of from personal experiences.

Yes, the sites she recommends are wonderful, but a little too obvious. It's like saying, when you travel to NYC for the first time, be sure to visit the Empire State Building. You know all the tourists are going to go there anyway, so why bother putting that on a list of places to see before you die?

But that's just me. I don't like resorts as much as I like little penizons in Slovakia.

A Useful Book
I was prepared to dislike this book. It was given to me as a present. The whole thesis seemed dangerous. If everyone tried to visit the same 1000 places they would be overwhelmed with tourists. Then who would want to go? Also, the very idea that everyone would like the same thing seemed over simplified. Last, how could a mere travel agent understand my sophisticated preferences?

In the sense of full disclosure, let me say that I received this book when I was 68 years old and had already traveled widely. My wife and I like a wide variety of things: from elegant big city hotels to camping in the wilderness. Museums, symphonic music, opera, and ballet are important. So is trout fishing. Last, we are unabashed foodies that plan restaurants carefully in advance.

When I picked up the book and started reading it, I was surprised. When I read about places I knew well, I had to admit that the things mentioned were the most interesting, not to be missed, things. For the last four years we have been consulting 1,000 Places before taking overseas trips. It has given us some ideas that we would not have had otherwise and they turned out to be very good ideas. Also, the places we visited were not over run by zillions of people who had read about them in 1,000 places.

Yes, it is a good hotel book. What do you want, a bad hotel book? It is always best to double check with Michelin if possible, but if a hotel is good it will probably not change too quickly. Restaurants are a different story. They can change overnight and 1,000 Places limited restaurant coverage can not be relied on.