Ryan wrote the Hungary chapter of this edition.

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Product Description

Frommer's. The best trips start here.

Experience a place the way the locals do.
Enjoy the best it has to offer.
*

Extensive information on reservations, scenic train routes, and discount railpasses.
*

Outspoken opinions on what's worth your time and what's not.
*

Exact prices, so you can plan the perfect trip whatever your budget.
*

Off-the-beaten-path experiences and undiscovered gems, plus new takes on top attractions.

Find great deals and book your trip at Frommers.com

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #149758 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 881 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780470174982
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Back Cover
Frommer's. The best trips start here.

Experience a place the way the locals do.
Enjoy the best it has to offer.

• Extensive information on reservations, scenic train routes, and discount railpasses.

• Outspoken opinions on what's worth your time and what's not.

• Exact prices, so you can plan the perfect trip whatever your budget.

• Off-the-beaten-path experiences and undiscovered gems, plus new takes on top attractions.

Find great deals and book your trip at Frommers.com

About the Author
Amy Eckert’s love affair with travel began on a train in Europe and it hasn’t stopped yet. As a college student Amy lived and worked in Southern Germany; as a travel writer she has returned many times since, traveling by train through a dozen countries including Germany, France, the Benelux nations, Italy, and Scandinavia.

After living several years in Germany as a freelance travel writer and in Tokyo as editor of Far East Traveler, Beth Reiber has written several Frommer’s guides, including Frommer’s Japan, Frommer’s Tokyo, and Frommer’s Hong Kong. She also contributes to Frommer’s USA and is a blogger for japantravelinfo.com. She resides in Kansas with her two sons, a dog, and a cat.

George McDonald has lived and worked in both Amsterdam and Brussels as deputy editor of the KLM in-flight magazine and as editor-in-chief of the Sabena in-flight magazine. Now a freelance journalist and travel writer based in Germany, he is the author of Frommer’s Amsterdam and Frommer’s Belgium, Holland & Luxembourg.

Hana Mastrini is a native of the western Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary who became a veteran of the “Velvet Revolution” as a student in Prague in 1989. She began contributing to Frommer’s guides while helping her husband, John, better understand his new home in the Czech Republic.

Olivia Edward is a British writer and photographer who specializes in travel and culture, and has contributed to guidebooks for MTV, Time Out, and DK. She loves sea air and raw fish, and was particularly happy researching the Scandinavian chapters for this guide. You can see more of her work at www.oliviaedward.com.

A freelance writer and editor, Jocelyn Auerbach grew up in both the U.S. and the U.K., and currently resides in France. Her childhood travels have created a strong desire to explore the world’s vast number of cultures—and to capture them all in the written word. So far, she’s managed to get to four continents . . . and counting.

Tania Kollias Eurailed her way through a gap-semester “On $10 a Day,” which sparked a few more years of travel across four continents. Based in Athens, Greece, she is an accredited journalist and has worked as a copy editor, writer/reporter and editor for more than a decade.

Ryan James earned a doctorate in International and Multicultural Education from the University of San Francisco. He has been living in Budapest, Hungary since 2001, and has been a full time instructor in the American Studies Department at Eötvös Loránd University since 2002. He has traveled to forty-five countries, so far.

Darwin Porter, a native of North Carolina, was assigned to write the very first edition of a Frommer’s guide devoted solely to one European country. Since then, he has written many bestselling Frommer’s guides to all the major European destinations. In 1982, he was joined in his research efforts by Danforth Prince, formerly of the Paris bureau of the New York Times, who has traveled and written extensively about Europe.

Native New Yorker Naomi Kraus is a senior editor at Frommer’s, a former travel agent, and a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She’s logged lots of miles on European trains over the years and rides the rails whenever she can.

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Customer Reviews

Not a useful guidebook
Not a safe bet, this European rail guide offers a strange mix of up-to-date and completely out-of-date information. It also tries to do too much, providing page after page of hotel, restaurant and museum listings by city but only a page of two of specific rail tips by country. The guide pushes Eurailpasses, as is to be expected from a publication endorsed by Rail Europe, the main stateside pass vendor.

Points to watch out for...

The guide is too optimistic about reservations and supplements. As the various continental railways move toward inevitable privatization, more and more premium services are being introduced. Most of the trips that tourists are likely to take will require reservations and supplements, in addition to Eurailpasses.

The guide doesn't give point-to-point tickets a fair shake, listing full prices and only the most basic discounts. For example, SNCF's "Prem's" specials (advance purchase online tickets to French and international destinations) aren't mentioned. For many tourists, these specials would make point-to-point tickets cheaper than Eurailpasses.

The guide lists only expensive, tourist-class hotels. I didn't see a single listing below 100 Euros in Paris, for example. There are many excellent, if humble, hotels throughout Europe. Use the Web to get current hotel information.

My favorite example of out-of-date information in the guide has to do with the regional express train ("RER") from Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle aiport to Paris. The guide lists both first and second-class ticket prices, even though the first-class designation disappeared years ago.

Frommer gets the substance right!
I found this guide very useful in plotting out where I wanted to go, how to get there, and what to visit. It was also nice to know about the student discounts at various attractions. I didn't use it for the hotel recomendations, and I used a few of the restaurant ideas, which were usually excellent choices. I traveled all over Europe (12 countries) using this book, the maps provided, and my Eurail. It was helpful in figuring out the ferry options to get from Western Europe to Scandinavia as well. I definately recomend this book to anyone traveling to Europe, as I found it very easy to use as well as useful.

A Good Rail Guidebook
In trying to decide which book to get for traveling around Europe for a few months by rail, I looked through this book, Let's Go Europe 2008, Rick Steves Best of Europe 2008, and Europe by Eurail 2008. The latter of these was broken down into sections devoted to major cities, and day trips by train from those cities, which seemed too much like a trip organizer for me. Rick Steves didn't really include the practical point-to-point info I was looking for. Let's Go Europe was comprehensive, but the city maps just weren't that clear.

At the beginning of each chapter (one per country), there's a map of the whole country, then in each city's subsection is a map of the city center with the train station clearly marked. There's a paragraph on each city's train station information, followed by information elsewhere and how best to get around the city. This is important to me, as I wanted a book that'd help me get my bearings upon arriving in a city. Let's Go is similarly formatted, and I think Fodor's is too, but this was the only one with this format geared specifically toward rail travel that I came across. This book also includes a nice laminated tear-out rail map, but I bought a separate map with more detailed city-to-city schedule info, and am also supplementing with timetables from eurail.com.

Before buying this, I had read the review mentioning that there's some out-of-date train ticket info in this book, but I feel like that's a risk you run with any book. It's true, though, that this book alone won't give one a clear understanding of specific ticket options and prices. Europe by Eurail gave a better explanation of these; you may want to glance over it in a store, or just visit www.ricksteves.com/rail or wikitravel.org/en/Eurail.